Lately, it’s become increasingly clear that relying exclusively on massive cloud providers — AWS, Microsoft Azure, Cloudflare, Google, etc. — presents serious concentration risk. For companies whose digital footprint is customer-facing and mission-critical, it’s wise to evaluate semi-private hosted infrastructure (or fully private infrastructure) as a core part of their strategy.
Cloud Outages Are No Longer Rare — They’re Systemic Risk
Consider recent incidents:
- On November 18, 2025, Cloudflare experienced a major internal service degradation that disrupted hundreds of sites and apps — including X (formerly Twitter), ChatGPT, Uber, and more. The Washington Post+2Reuters+2
- In October 2025, AWS suffered a widespread outage, affecting millions of users across major platforms: Zoom, YouTube, Reddit, Snapchat, and more. Axios+1
- Around the same period, Microsoft Azure went down, reportedly linked to a configuration change in its Azure Front Door network — disrupting services like Office 365, Xbox Live, and other high-traffic systems. AP News
- Earlier, in June 2025, Google Cloud had a significant outage that rippled through Cloudflare’s infrastructure (Workers KV store, among others), affecting apps like Spotify and Discord. CRN+1
- And going back to July 2024, a faulty CrowdStrike update caused 8.5 million Windows systems to crash, even impacting virtual machines on Azure. Wikipedia+1
These are not one-off “someone pushed the wrong button” mistakes — they reflect how deeply we’ve centralized internet infrastructure. When a handful of vendors touch so much of the web, a single issue can cascade widely.
Why a Semi-Private (or Private) Hosting Layer Helps
Given this fragility, building or maintaining a semi-private or private infrastructure — even alongside public cloud — offers several compelling benefits for medium and large companies:
- Reducing Single-Point-of-Failure Risk
When you host mission-critical workloads on your own infrastructure (or with a dedicated provider), you’re not fully exposed to global cloud provider outages. If AWS or Cloudflare goes down, your core systems can keep running independently. - Better Control Over Configuration
In private environments, you can architect redundancy, failover, and monitoring exactly as needed, without being constrained by the black box of a public provider’s internal configurations or feature flags. - Predictable Performance & Cost
Public clouds offer elasticity, but unpredictable outages can disrupt your SLAs and revenue. With private or semi-private hosting, you can tune for consistent performance and potentially more predictable costs, especially when usage is stable. - Security & Compliance
Some industries require strict compliance around data sovereignty, isolation, or custom security policies. Private infrastructure or dedicated hosting gives you more control over where and how data resides. - Hybrid Strategy Possibility
You don’t necessarily need to abandon public clouds — a hybrid model often makes the most sense. Use private infrastructure for your most critical systems, and public clouds for burstable or less sensitive workloads.
A Balanced Take
I want to be clear: public clouds aren’t going away, and they remain incredibly valuable. They offer unmatched scale, global reach, and a rich ecosystem of services. For many companies — especially smaller ones — public cloud makes sense for 100% of their infrastructure.
But for medium-sized businesses, or larger companies with high-stakes public infrastructure, the risk of putting everything in the hands of a few hyperscalers is real. Outages are not just theoretical — the recent ones involving Cloudflare, AWS, Azure, and Google show that even industry giants struggle with reliability.
By committing to a semi-private or private setup, such companies can build a more resilient and controllable infrastructure, minimizing the chances that a single provider disruption turns into a public outage, lost revenue, or reputational damage.