The price for Hetzner's EX 4S is 49.58 EUR for non-EU customers and 59 EUR per month VAT-included for most EU customers (EU corporations registered for VAT purposes need to apply the VAT specific to their own country).<p>An Amazon m2.4xlarge instance (High-Memory Quadruple Extra Large Reserved Instance) with Heavy Utilization on a 3-year commitment costs $9'660 for the 3y term and 3 * 365 * 24 * $0.454 = $11'931 in usage fees, which means a $21'591 total, $7'197 per year or $600 per month (EUR 458 per month at the current exchange rate).<p>458 EUR versus 49-60 EUR is 9x more expensive at full-time usage. (instance type and price data extracted from <a href="http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/" rel="nofollow">http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/</a> and <a href="http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/" rel="nofollow">http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/</a> ).<p>If you were to consider just the Amazon Heavy Utilization term commitment for 3 years, that's still $9'660 / 3 / 12 = $268 (EUR 205) each month.
Apples / Oranges.<p>Quite apart from the ability to buy by the hour, the Hetzner offering really isn't suitable for processing any data you care about - it's not using ECC RAM, and the processor used doesn't support it.
You might also want to check out some benchmarks I ran a few weeks ago. It compares many types of EC2 instances: <a href="http://blog.carlmercier.com/2012/01/05/ec2-is-basically-one-big-ripoff/" rel="nofollow">http://blog.carlmercier.com/2012/01/05/ec2-is-basically-one-...</a>
Why is this company getting so much attention as of late? I've never heard of them until recently, and considering how crowded the whole VPS/dedicated server market is, what makes them stand out?
For those that are curious, the motherboard in these systems is a ASUSTeK P8H67-M PRO. Seems like it's a gaming board - understandable given it's an i7 platform.