Cloud services aimed at businesses offer a cost-effective and a hassle-free way to create a digital service which would otherwise need a team of developers, a lot of money and expensive hosting. Most of them are mouse driven and require little to no technical knowledge after the initial setup. But when is using a cloud based service not the route you should take? Consider these questions first:

• Do you need custom features?
• Should the data be hosted at a certain location (country, continent) due to legal reasons?
• Do you know exactly what your requirements are or should there be room for improvising new features?
• How well does the cloud service scale feature and price wise?
• Have you reviewed all of the use cases for the service and compared them to its features?
• Are you prepared to accept an arbitrary limitation that might pop up and prevent something from working the way you thought it would?

I’m a big fan of using cloud services, but they’re not a magical one-size-fits-all solution. The better your own specification and planning for what you want out of a cloud service, the easier it is to figure out if it fits your business’ needs.