Cloud services rock

Fellow Googler, Matt Cutts, has an entry on his blog today about cloud services, or at least about why cloud services would have been good for him over the weekend:

So there you go: I went on vacation for a week and came back to two scary reminders why hosted services and storing data “in the cloud” (on someone else’s servers) can be better than doing it yourself. In general, a well-run cloud service is going to be much more reliable than any average person would be.

I couldn't agree more, but hadn't really thought about my own network for awhile. So I took a step back and realized that I've moved completely into the cloud.

Currently I use the following services, which I used to have to maintain myself on dedicated servers:

• Blogging - I use Blogger to maintain all of my blogs. It works great for me, and I don't have to worry about updating software. I do still have a few years of old posts that I haven't moved into blogger yet, but that is a minor problem.
• Email - I use Google Apps for email for my domain, so no need to maintain IMAP, POP, and SMTP servers.
• DNS - I use dreamhost to manage my DNS.
• Backup - I've been playing with Mozy to keep my Backups online, although my upstream bandwidth on my home DSL may not be able to handle this.
• Storage - I store many of my documents in a Subversion repository on a hosted shell account.

So, almost all of my computing is hosted in the cloud. It's great because I don't have to spend my free time managing linux servers, and applying patches. It's also great because I can get to almost all of my documents from any computer, which means that I don't necessarily have to bring my own computer when I travel.