Buying your own Physical hardware is so cheap now its crazy. A commodity Ryzen 16 vCPU box is about the same price as 2 months rent on EC2.<p>I get maintenance, electricity and bandwidth isn't free but I honestly thought cloud server prices would be much lower by now. No wonder AWS is making huge profits.
PR speak aside, it looks like they are trying to get people to switch to certain regions, perhaps which are not popular with lot of idle machines? The popular locations like Oregon and Virginia don't have much discounts to offer.
Are they still extorting customers by price gouging bandwidth? Maybe one day I’ll wake up to news they’ve decided to charge for capacity instead of transfer.
"The price reduction you receive, depends on the region you choose, whether you take out a 1 or 3 year term and finally the instance family you commit to in your agreement. Price reductions vary from between 1% to a massive 18% on what you were previously paying"<p>18% reductions for 1 year terms in Europe.<p>8% in mnt US region for 1 year term. No savings elsewhere.<p>Some prices reductions elsewhere in the world.
I'm holding out for a better price on GPU instances (for parallel processing).<p>My 'back of the napkin' calculations indicate it would take very little time for it to pay for itself by purchasing your own NVIDIA GPU(s) and running them from a colo.<p>Especially if your requirements are for the instance(s) to run 24x7.
Hmm, given the uneven reductions between regions, I wonder if this is more of a move to balance (and increase) demand so that it more closely matches their supply. So then I guess the question is: why do they have excess supply?
I'm wondering if this is to support small businesses/startups in the light of Covid19. I know they amazon and google are already giving covid19 discounts to companies but that won't cut it. I personally know so many startups who are looking at their huge server bills and won't be able to survive for long if that pricing continues. A failed startup is just one less customer for cloud companies. So could this new pricing be to to keep existing small/medium customers ? Just a thought. What do you guys are experiencing around ?