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220-1201 Practice Question: That a cloud-hosted application is running very…
A user reports that a cloud-hosted application is running very slowly during peak hours. The application is hosted on an IaaS platform with a single virtual machine. Which of the following is the most likely cause?
⚠ Common exam trap
220-1201 often tests the shared responsibility model and cloud resource constraints — candidates may incorrectly blame the provider's infrastructure (outage) or the user's ISP when the issue is the customer's under-provisioned VM.
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
The virtual machine is under-provisioned for the current workload
A single virtual machine on IaaS that runs slowly during peak hours is most likely under-provisioned — insufficient vCPU, memory, or I/O for the peak workload. Cloud VMs have fixed resource allocations, so when demand spikes, the instance becomes a bottleneck, causing high latency.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
The user's internet connection is saturated
Why it's wrong here
While a user's internet connection could be saturated, this scenario describes slowdowns specific to a single cloud-hosted application during peak hours. If the local internet connection were the bottleneck, all internet-dependent services and applications on the user's network would likely experience similar performance degradation, not just one particular application intermittently.
- ✓
The virtual machine is under-provisioned for the current workload
Why this is correct
Under-provisioning means the virtual machine (VM) lacks sufficient allocated resources, such as CPU cores, RAM, or I/O capacity, to handle the demands of the application during periods of high usage. When the workload increases significantly, the VM becomes resource-constrained, leading to processing delays, increased latency, and the observed application slowdowns and unresponsiveness during peak hours.
- ✗
The cloud provider is experiencing a regional outage
Why it's wrong here
A regional outage by a cloud provider signifies a widespread disruption affecting multiple data centers or availability zones within a specific geographic region. Such an event would typically render numerous cloud services and applications inaccessible or severely impaired for many users, not just cause intermittent slowdowns for a single application during its peak usage times.
- ✗
The application's power supply is failing
Why it's wrong here
In a cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) model, the underlying physical hardware, including power supplies, is managed and maintained by the cloud provider with high redundancy. A failing power supply would typically lead to a complete and abrupt failure of the physical host server or its components, not intermittent slowdowns of a virtual machine, which is an abstracted resource.
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Related to this question
Learn chapter
Thermal Paste Application
Key term
Anything As A Service
A model where you rent any IT resource or service over the internet instead of owning it.
Key term
Latency
Latency is the time delay between a request being sent over a network and the response being received, often measured in milliseconds.
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JA
Written and reviewed by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
Last reviewed September 2026 · checked against the official CompTIA exam blueprint
This 220-1201 practice question is part of Courseiva's free CompTIA certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the 220-1201 exam.