EC2 is about 10-20 times more expensive than dedicated hosting. Even if reserved instances save us 22% over 3 years, it still doesn't even come close. Reserved instances also force me to commit to using a certain type of EC2 instance for 3 years with lots of money upfront. Moreover, IO is ridiculously bad on EC2 and there's nothing that can be done about it. Even RAIDing a gazillion EBS volumes together doesn't do much.<p>I'm glad the truth about how expensive EC2 really is is starting to come out. Hopefully it will force them to revise their pricing, or at least offer more processing power for the same price.<p>I ran some benchmarks a few weeks ago that show how expensive EC2 really is <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>.<p>That said, I <i>love</i> the flexibility of AWS. RDS, S3, EBS and the whole ecosystem is really well thought out. I just wish I could get real performance out of it.<p>EDIT: 10-20 times more expensive, not "orders of magnitude"
AWS should have shaved down the cost of the dedicated unit as well, if we are in cost cutting mode. Those prices would look very different if they just used some plain jane boxes from 100tb.com or leaseweb.<p>In order for AWS to make sense, you need to utilize the hourly billing. If you use EC2 and leave you server on 24/7, you are going to be paying more for less powerful hardware than you could with dedicated. Yes, they have a fancy datacenter and instant provisioning and cool backups. You are still paying more. Way more in some cases.<p>*This does not apply for tiny websites. If your hosting bill is 100$ or less a month, amazon is likely fine for you and maybe the most effective cost saver. Once you go above that mark, Its almost always more effective to be on dedicated unless you are one of the very few people who has truely hourly based service (Think, a seti@home where you only crunch data once a month) - Any normal "website" will do better with dedicated.<p>Finally, to summarize the above. EC2's main, most important, if-you-arent-using-it-you-are-doing-it-wrong, feature is HOURLY BILLING. If you dont constantly switch on and off from different sizes (and you spend a decent amount of cash) then dedicated is likely better for you.<p>Dont get me wrong, EC2 is great. But use it for overflow. Or use it for the bells and whistles. Or use it because you have more cash and you would rather not deal with the issues and you like simpledb and yadda yadda yadda. Use it for whatever reason you like. Just dont use it because its cheaper. Because its not.
This was disappointingly dishonest: they shave the AWS numbers down to a few grand under the self-hosting cost and end on a note saying these analyses should be done apples-to-apples, but neglect to point out the far more expensively flawed methodology in the self-hosting cost: <i>buying</i> and colocating 131 <i>dedicated</i> servers based on the peak requirement of 131 <i>leased</i> EC2 <i>virtual</i> servers.<p>For those interested it's Amazon's rebuttal to the story discussed here: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3580273" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3580273</a>
The cost that everyone fails to recognize is the cost (performance-wise) of virtualization. Simply comparing X instances of EC2 to X instances of bare metal ignores the fact that a bare metal instance could range anywhere from 1x to 50x more performance for equivalent specifications. For memory bound applications you might get equivalent performance for the specs but for IOPS-bound or CPU-bound you'll probably take an order of magnitude performance hit for the same specification of hardware when virtualized.<p>Any analysis like this needs to first find a set of comparable servers that have performance parity (for the given application) first instead of merely specification parity.
About a month ago I did a bit of pricing for having a permanently-on dedicated virtual server through Amazon:<p>Micro - $105.80/yr (reserved instance)<p>Bandwidth - $0.00/mo (light transfer usage)<p>S3 - $0.20/mo (combining storage and transfer)<p>CloudFront - $0.20/mo (combining requests and transfer)<p>After a quick glance around I found that it was going to be impossible to beat that price, most especially for the services gained by using AWS (CloudFront, S3, CLI interface + tools, ability to spin up an instance behind the scenes and swap over to it once properly configured...)<p>The moral of this story is to <i>make sure that you price out the cost of using any platform for your particular usage profile</i>.
This is the biggest, most dishonest, load of shit I've ever read by Amazon.<p>Yes, there are interesting aspects to AWS. But I could host servers at SoftLayer with 10x more power than AWS instances at a 5-10x price reduction.<p>Even hosting at an overpriced "managed" dedicated provider like Rackspace would run you less than AWS.
We have thousands of users who run their servers on Amazon using one of our AMIs (<a href="http://bitnami.org" rel="nofollow">http://bitnami.org</a>) Whether EC2 is more or less expensive than the alternatives is a complex topic highly dependent on your particular requirements. Having said that, our perspective is that you need to consider the overall value you get for your money. There are features like the ability to take incremental snapshots of your entire machine for backup or cloning purposes that have no match by other hosting providers. That feature alone saves us innumerable hours of development and system administration. Our staging servers are not setup like or production servers, they can <i>be</i> exact copies of your production servers, on demand. How many bugs/issues do you think we avoid with that? For us, enough of them that any price difference with a "traditional" setup is not worth it
We at Fotki were approached several times by Amazon, and they tried to make us switch, and every time we calculated, we were getting around $75..100K per month just for storage, not including traffic and other stuff... It is pretty much true that their price is 10x or 20x of owning your own hardware.
I would say, everything considered (thus inevitably comparing apples and oranges at least in some respect), hosting options ordered by longer-term cost from lowest to highest:<p>1. colocation w/ yours or your admin team physical access<p>2. AWS<p>3. normal hosting<p>And I've put AWS on the 2nd place only due to the ability of replacing or scaling your hardware in minutes.<p>It's good to know that for $11k a year (paid upfront) plus traffic costs one can run their biggest GPU instance on 10GigE connection, or a 60 GB RAM machine on a normal connection.<p>I think AWS is absolutely unbeatable for startups where you are not sure about the success upfront.<p>Also, I'm running my Node.js sites on a Micro instance which I have free for the first year, and $16/mo onwards.
I think a fair comparison is very complicated and depends a lot on: do you need to occasionally ramp up the number of servers, do services like Elastic Map Reduce work well in your system for occasional data crunching, do SimpleDB and DynamoDB fit in your architecture, does EBS with high durabilty but slower IO performance meet your needs, does having lots of cheap S3 storage with free inner-data region bandwidth save you money?<p>If enough of these considerations match your needs, then AWS looks great, otherwise look to dedicated servers.
I am surprised I don't see the geographic distribution of AWS as a huge appealing aspect of the service.<p>If you are trying to deploy a global solution, I don't know any way as cost effective as rolling out images to all the regions you need and rolling out the same scripts, knowledge, strategies to each region to get your service up and running.<p>Opening accounts with dedicated providers in each country as an alternative sounds infinitely more painful.
AWS is cost effective in some scenarios while not in others. It really strongly depends on actual needs, what resources are needed, in what proportion, etc. There is an article which tries to answer if Amazon is really the cheapest provider: <a href="http://blog.cloudorado.com/2011/08/is-amazon-cheapest-cloud-computing.html" rel="nofollow">http://blog.cloudorado.com/2011/08/is-amazon-cheapest-cloud-...</a><p>You can compare the prices with custom configurations of multiple providers with Cloudorado - <a href="http://www.cloudorado.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.cloudorado.com</a>.
In order to be competitive with dedicated hosting, AWS should introduce per-month heavy utilization pricing option. 1 and 3 years is too long to commit for startups.
One thing I've always thought about the three-year reserved instance is what happens if AWS lowers the price on the configuration, you've already lock in on the higher price. Three years is a lot of time, technology advances quickly and prices decrease, but if you lock in on the three-year contract, you won't see the benefits of lower costs. Actually, now that I write this, maybe this is how Amazon justifies the lower price for longer contracts.