Cloud computing is no longer some obscure concept, fit only for cocktail banter at Silicon Valley parties, according to The Motley Crew. Gartner, CDW and many others concur. Yet news headlines regularly tell us of the cloud crashing.

Have these experts got it right? Is it really time to get in with the Cloud Crowd?

OK, so I’ve been as guilty as anyone of informing you of relevant web sites and services crashing and of warning against the impact of downtime on the country in view of the government’s 2014 plans. However, it seems the world and his blog are ready for the cloud to finally deliver its promise this year.

If you’re thinking the time is right to get in with the Crowd Cloud, my advice is …. do. Be sure, though, to select a provider whose SLA guarantees uptime. Uptime is king of the cloud. Be aware that it’s not just the huge public cloud providers whose services regularly crash. Private cloud providers do too.

Indeed, the SLAs of many private cloud providers are full of holes . This being so, it’s worth knowing about the API Status website which helps you to keep an eye on 26 popular APIs,  including those provided by Digg, Bit.ly, Amazon, Bing. Flickr, Amazon and (of course) Twitter.

The site makes it very easy to learn exactly when any of these APIs goes down, and to arrive at conclusive overall figures. Also, it will let you figure out if any difficulty that you are experiencing is a global one, or if it is only your desktop playing tricks on you.

Whether you’re talking  private or internal cloud – internal being inside the enterprise firewall – delivering the services promised is what matters: users need to have total confidence that they can get to their data whenever they need it. All crowd providers claim to offer such ‘always on’ service.

The truth is that many have infrastructure choke points where, if a server fails, service delivery is interrupted. It is those choke points where continuously available servers are uniquely capable of ensuring delivery of cloud services.

So, sure, the cloud is the place to be in 2010. Check out whether your provider hosts on a continuously available server before picking which one to hop onto though…