The pros and cons of cloud hosting

Though it may seem silly, it is not always about cost and performance. In many cases, EC2 allows you much more flexibility than a traditional dedicated server. One example, for EBS-based servers it is possible to clone the entire server with just one API call. This allows you to test upgrades, performance enhancements, etc. without disturbing the production server configuration. And you will be doing so in an <i>exact</i> replica of the machine, minimizing the bugs or issues introduced when an staging or test system had changes applied. Another one: it is simple to resize your server as needed. You can start with a micro instance when developing and then scale to bigger instance types as needed after you on production. With a dedicated server, it is much complex to migrate your setup. We take advantage of those and other features at BitNami Cloud Hosting (<a href="http://bitnami.org/cloud" rel="nofollow">http://bitnami.org/cloud</a>) and have had a lot of success so far.<p>Finally, hosting on Amazon is not only about EC2, it is about the whole ecosystem. You can take advantage of many other services, such as their offerings for MySQL (RDS), memcached (elastic cache), CDN (CloudFront), monitoring (CloudWatch), etc.. Like any other technologies, they have their shortcomings, but can save a significant amount of time and effort vs. doing it yourself and they are way ahead of anybody else in the space (specially traditional hosting companies)<p>As a side note, EC2 costs can be significantly reduced with reserved instances if you are willing to commit to 1 or 3 year terms.

There's a sweet spot where virtualized solutions make sense, but it's really easy to find reasons why owning and colocating your own metal is more economical. I have a 1/3rd private rack and a 100mbit uncapped unlimited dedicated port, for $570 a month. I have five servers in there, which I have cobbled together for pretty cheap (for the most part). I would be paying $3000 a month for the equivalent cloud solution....<p>For anything requiring real IO performance or tons of memory, stick with your own hardware.

There are actually 3 major alternatives here, and the article ignores the third:<p>1) Run on dedicated hardware.<p>2) Run on EC2, or another "Infrastructure as a Service" provider.<p>3) Run on Heroku, or another "Platform as a Service" provider.<p>For smaller companies, it really comes down to a few questions: Who's worrying about your database backups? Who handles security patches? What happens when a critical machine fails on Christmas week?<p>Many smaller companies will be happiest with option (3), because somebody else worries about backups, security, and machine failure for you. Sure, it's expensive. But it's a lot nicer than calling your senior programmer back from vacation because of a catastrophic RAID failure.<p>Option (1) certainly <i>looks</i> cheaper on paper. But many small companies are skimping on something critical, and they'll get burnt within the next 5 years.

It's better, in my opinion, to think of various cloud providers as just another endpoint in the evolving infrastructural API layer available to people and companies.<p>The breadth of options becoming available is fantastic; it's not that long ago that hosting options were:<p><pre><code> * sharing a single physical machine with a group of unknown other customers * renting one or more single physical machines with preselected hardware/OS * Purchasing your own hardware and co-locating it in a data center * Building a data center </code></pre> Right now, PaaS providers are taking advantage of all this newly available, ephemeral, programmable computing power to build abstracted services, allowing other developers/companies to take advantage of pooled expertise and resources.<p>I think, if I were building the infrastructure for a company today (which I am helping with, for a lot of companies), I'd definitely eat the additional cost (can be offset quite a bit by reserved instances) and idiosyncrasies (instance degradation, unexpected performance characteristics) of Amazon.<p>I spent years toiling over hardware quirks, flakey SCSI adapters, power outages, failing or aging machines. If you rent boxes, you're relying on SLAs (if you can get them) and sometimes insane costs for an onsite engineer to fix something you broke (I mucked up a firewall config once on leased dedicated hardware. Don't do that. Ouch.)<p>There are similar outages with cloud providers, but depending on which rung of the abstraction you're on, (IaaS, PaaS, etc) you might be in a much better position to redeploy your infrastructure elsewhere if it's a real disaster.<p>The bigger your product/service gets, the more expensive your downtime is (and the more you're spending on engineers to make sure it doesn't go down. Oh, and your hardware has quirks, and your engineers know them - if they leave, they take that knowledge with them).<p>Of course, there are situations where you'll want to minimize financial outlay, run something that's not a "web app", don't mind getting your hands dirty, willing to risk hardware failures, etc. Hopefully PaaS providers will continue to bridge the gap for most people.

that is quite a bit of hardware for $51 a month. Anyone know of servers in the US that are priced even close?

Why do people always compare EC2 _On-Demand Instances_ cost to classic hosting cost?<p>The actual cost for a planned _Reserved Instance_ on EC2 is much lower and is a much more realistic scenario for hosting : it cost about 27$/month for a 3 years reserved small instance (425$/36 months + 14.64$), not 60$/month.<p>No one knowing it will use an instance 100% time should opt for On-Demand instance, because yeah, it costs a lot.<p><a href="https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/#pricing" rel="nofollow">https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/#pricing</a> <a href="http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/calc5.html" rel="nofollow">http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/calc5.html</a>

While the article is a useful comparison of straight EC2 vs dedicated servers, it doesn't touch on the cloud PaaS options such as Heroku that eliminate so many complications of installing and tuning and maintaining your frameworks. IMO comparing "cloud vs dedicated" without reference to PaaS options is akin to comparing "combustion engines to bicycles" without mentioning motorcycles.

Great discussion - would be an interesting poll to see exactly what hardware setups HN users run. When looking at options for our bootstrapped startup, was very surprised to find the costs of Amazon compared to dedicated boxes, or even a couple of dedicated VPS instances. It appears so many people I have spoken to who use AWS do not even automatically spin up instances when they need them, so have to manually react and then bring them up... And another startup who have automatically scaled up the instances have also had massive bills when someone found a loophole and distributed manga art via their services.

There's one other drawback that made us switch from AWS to dedicated hosting (among others such as those mentioned in the post): latency<p>At least in Europe Amazon has only one datacenter, quite at the outskirts in Ireland. We could save some 20% in load time by moving to Germany, where our customers are!

This brings up a question I've also wondered when looking at moving to EC2: it simply costs more to run when you have a few servers that use up a lot of bandwidth. At what scale does it become more efficient?