Amazon Drops Price Of EC2 Dedicated Instances By Up To 80%

http://techcrunch.com/2013/07/10/amazon-drops-price-of-ec2-dedicated-instances-by-up-to-80/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29

by cdvonstinkpot • 13 years ago

290 174 13 years ago

techcrunch.com

mikiem• 13 years ago

These prices were ridiculous to start with. Now the are only 20% as ridiculous.

manojlds• 13 years ago

That number should be less than 20%, no?

_delirium• 13 years ago

Direct link: http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2013/07/09/price-r...

jdmitch• 13 years ago

Amazon's response to higher demand (anticipated or real) for dedicated instances outside of the US to avoid the NSA's prying eyes?

wmf• 13 years ago

Aren't all those servers still owned and operated by a US company?

Create• 13 years ago

Amazon Web Services has achieved compliance with the Federal Risk Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP).

The FedRAMP program has also established a Joint Accreditation Board (JAB) consisting of Chief Information Officers from DoD, DHS and GSA.

_stephan2• 13 years ago

Hourly billed "bare-metal" cloud servers from Softlayer seem to be cheaper still: http://www.softlayer.com/cloudlayer/computing

LogicX3• 13 years ago

and softlayer is at the high end of the market.

Check out incero.com or securedservers.com for some perspective.

also serverbear.com is always great to check for price-performance comparisons, especially taking into account SSD performance.

_stephan2• 13 years ago

incero and securedservers don't seem to offer hourly billed dedicated servers. Monthly billed dedicated servers are a different market.

hpkuarg• 13 years ago

I've always been curious about these "less reputable" dedicated/colo providers. SoftLayer seems to have a great reputation, but it's also twice as expensive as, say, Incero or SecuredServers that you just mentioned. Are they reliable business partners?

Udo3• 13 years ago

Choosing EC2 and other Amazon offerings means a lot of freedom for startups, it's easy to just create a whole infrastructure at the push of a button. However, this comes at a high cost. Amazon is really expensive and once you're locked into their way of doing things, migrating away can be a near-impossible task. I think for some years, companies didn't realize how high the cost of running on EC2/S3 actually is compared to, say, a dedicated rack colocated somewhere - that's kind of a compliment to Amazon tech and marketing.

It's still not uncommon to talk to a random startup person and they'll tell you they have hosting costs in the tens of thousands of dollars per year. When you then compare this to what they're actually doing with their servers, it seems to me they're overpaying by several orders of magnitude.

I was using EC2 for years and kind of grew to accept (and ignore) its limitations. It was only when I reviewed some dedicated server plans at other providers I (re-)discovered how much raw power you can get elsewhere for the same money. Additionally, I became very frustrated with the lack of pricing transparency and inability to forecast costs - at first glance the Amazon cloud is as open as it gets but the real surprises come when you're running it for a while.

No doubt Amazon has caught on to this trend and is fighting to squeeze out some competitors that have sprung up. This pricing change is most likely directly aimed at Hetzner and other inexpensive-but-powerful hosting providers. It means they were either massively overcharging the whole time or they are using profits from other plans to offer Dedicated EC2 at a loss until the competition folds.

Fizzer• 13 years ago

Are you comparing EC2's hourly rate with dedicated hardware? If so, you're comparing apples and oranges.

With EC2, the hourly rate is outrageous for an always-on server. You really need to buy reserved instances for it to be cost-effective. In my case I found I really needed to buy the 3-year heavy utilization reserved instances.

The hourly rate is best just for occasional spikes or when you're experimenting with different hardware configurations.

And yes, they were massively overcharging for dedicated instances, as they charged $7300 per month just for the privilege of being able to use dedicated instances (that doesn't include the cost of the instance itself.) I always assumed they were doing so just to reserve that feature for their big customers.

latch2• 13 years ago

This is a common misrepresentation. Given a unit, reserved instances might be price competitive, but that unit won't be performance competitive. Even with reserved instances, you're talking about 2-4x worse price/performance at the minimum (much, much worse if SSDs are involved). Not to mention the upfront cost...

Using reserved instances is the exact opposite of what anyone should be doing. The only way to get price competitive with EC2 is to go the absolute other direction: establish a baseline with dedicated/colo and use spot instances for tasks or to handle peaks.

vidarh2• 13 years ago

Of course he is comparing apples and oranges, yet it is how a substantial number of people actually use AWS. Dedicated instances goes some way towards mitigating it, but for a lot of people the short term billing makes AWS look cheap, and their dedicated servers were definitively still not cheap prior to this even just looking at the cost of the instances.

A lot of people are completely blinkered when it comes to the cost of using AWS.

vidarh2• 13 years ago

I actually was at one point pushed hard by the CEO at a company I worked at to use EC2 because it "had to" be cheap, despite the fact I had put together numbers for him that clearly demonstrated it was between twice as expensive (purely managed servers with enough headroom to handle short term spikes) to three times expensive (managed servers loaded at 80%-90% of typical daily peak loads plus set up to use EC2 to handle peaks in emergencies). Amazon has done an amazing job in marketing and PR for AWS.

The latter is what EC2 is most useful for for me: You can cut costs of your dedicated hosting by going much closer to the wire with the knowledge you can spin up instances at EC2 (and/or other cloud providers) if you should happen to hit the front page somewhere that can drive massive traffic faster / on more transient basis than you can or want to scale up your dedicated setup.

Hetzner is great, but fully integrated providers like Softlayer is another growing threat - many providers now offer a sliding scale of some or all from colo, to managed bare metal, to "dedicated virtual" (single VM per physical server, automatically deployed in minutes or hours as a "halfway house" to cloud setups), to cloud images billed similarly to EC2. It'll be interesting to see what IBM tries to do with Softlayer...

_pmf_• 13 years ago

Choosing EC2 and other Amazon offerings

Do you have any data on how pure S3 storage is priced relative to other solutions?

twistedpair• 13 years ago

When you then compare this to what they're actually doing with their servers, it seems to me they're overpaying by several orders of magnitude.

So, you can get that $10,000/yr dedicated server for $10/yr elsewhere? What host is that. I need to check them out.

Bamafan• 13 years ago

I think for some years, companies didn't realize how high the cost of running on EC2/S3 actually is compared to, say, a dedicated rack colocated somewhere...

But this ignores the cost of paying someone to setup/maintain that rack, cost to fix the server when something goes wrong, etc.

Setup/maintenance of physical infrastructure has a cost too.

bfung• 13 years ago

A lot of conversation is about the cost of acquisition, but does not compare the prices of maintenance, hardware failure/outages, and recovery.

For example, with dedicated hardware and a guessed failure rate, how much does it cost, over time, to 1) replace the hardware, software, and configuration and 2) value lost (could be goodwill, could be $$$) due to outage.

With AWS using chef/puppet/salt/etc., it's trivial to boot up new nodes and down the malfunctioning ones. The value of that is super high.

cstejerean4• 13 years ago

After all the talk about how much cheaper dedicated hosting can be compared to AWS, I looked into dedicated hosting recently. It didn't seem as great as the comments here led me to believe. Rackspace for example starts at $499/month for a server with 4GB of RAM. On AWS I can get a c1.xlarge instance with 7GB of RAM for $435/month, and that's with paying the on-demand price 24x7.

Ok, that doesn't include EBS and bandwidth. So let's throw in 1TB of outbound data (less than the 2TB that Rackspace includes, but still more than I'd ever use in a month) and a 150GB EBS volume with 1000 provision IOPS. Let's also use the 1 year heavy utilization price while we're at it. Now I'm looking $342/month with $1800 upfront, which amortizes to $492/month.

With AWS I also don't need to stick with paying 24x7 for infrastructure. I don't need to keep my CI infrastructure running on nights and weekends for example, and with AWS I have the flexibility to turn that into cost savings.

So I don't see the order of magnitude price difference. So maybe I shouldn't be looking at Rackspace? Hetzner keeps coming up on here, but I don't need a server in Europe. Maybe OVH? Hmm, the comments on Hacker News don't exactly inspire confidence in OVH for something more than a personal server to screw around with. I need to run infrastructure for my business. Do I start hunting for bargain hosting providers on WebHostingTalk?

Ok, back to AWS it is for me.

EDIT: Thanks for the suggestions to look at Softlayer. A server with 1 CPU and 8GB of RAM starts at $399, which is better than Rackspace, but not exactly orders of magnitude cheaper than the c1.xlarge I mentioned above.

asb• 13 years ago

Looking from Rackspace to OVH is really going straight from one extreme to another. Softlayer is a more sensible middle-ground (though note their list prices are high, you'll almost always be able to get 2x RAM or similar).

Udo3• 13 years ago

I think you picked the most expensive dedicated hosting provider in existence. Have a look at SoftLayer, Hetzner, Incero, or one of the other alternatives. Also, at these prices, it's not unreasonable to just order any old Dell server for $600 and put it into a colo rack somewhere.

For reference, the dedicated server I rent for my private projects comes in at €49/month and it has these specs:

  Intel® Core™ i7-2600 Quad-Core
  16 GB DDR 3 RAM
  2 x 3 TB SATA 6 Gb/s HDD; 7200 rpm

Support is extremely fast and competent, I'm really happy. To try and mirror that package with any kind of Amazon (or Rackspace it seems) offering would be prohibitively costly.

banachtarski• 13 years ago

Look at softlayer. I'm moving the whole company off AWS.

bhouston• 13 years ago

OVH is really cheap as well:

http://www.ovh.com/ca/en/dedicated-servers/

thecombjelly• 13 years ago

Also checkout M5 hosting[1][2]. They have excellent customer support and I've had no issues since I started using them a few months ago. I currently have a dedicated freebsd server, for $209/month:

Xeon X3450 Quad Core, 32GB ECC RAM, 2x 500GB HD, and 2TB/month bandwidth plus a whole bunch of extra IPs allowing me to run numerous jails for hosting all sorts of sites and dev-environments. Very good machine for the price. You can still pick one up [3].

[1] http://www.m5hosting.com [2] They are also working on a an amazon AWS competitor service. [3] http://www.m5hosting.com/buynow.php

druiid4• 13 years ago

To be honest, you chose looking at the most expensive dedicated hosting provider. Also, they're just not-that-great. Their service and support staff are wonderful, but as soon as you actually need to do anything complex... good luck getting an engineer on the phone. It used to take us three or more calls to get someone higher level on the phone and we were paying five-figure type sums to them each month.

Also, we got DoS attacks all the time on their network and not one since we moved to our own hardware... Obviously take this with a grain of salt, but take the other comments to heart and actually look into other dedicated provider pricing. You might be surprised.

benologist• 13 years ago

Try Hivelocity: http://hivelocity.net/.

They're great and cheap.

x0x02• 13 years ago

in case you are unaware, first, see the perf difference in my previous post, and second, the public pricing on softlayer is a price ceiling. If you are buying multiple machines, even perhaps as few as 4 or 5 a month, you can probably negotiate a nice discount and certainly if you are renting 10-20/mo. Of course they will happily sell for the price on the site.

papsosouid3• 13 years ago

Same here. These "amazon is so expensive and so slow" posts show up here constantly, and every time I try to get information on alternatives, and nobody has anything. A single dedicated server running in some warehouse is not a replacement for AWS. I need S3, or I need a bunch of storage devices in multiple datacenters automatically keeping the files I put on them synced. Which hosting provider is doing that again? Where is my EBS with a dedicated server warehouse? I need block device that is durable, and can be quickly and easily detached from one server and attached to another. Even the cheapest redundant iSCSI SAN setup is very expensive.

I am not paying for AWS because I am dumb, I am paying for AWS because they provide services that allow me to outsource the high durability to them. Someone show me an actual alternative please, rather than just repeating "zomghosting.biz gives you a million gigs for $20!!1".

nobodysfool• 13 years ago

4 CPU and 7GB ram on Windows Azure is $268/month if you use Windows, and $179/month if you are using Linux. Add $120 for 1TB outbound traffic, and you are looking at $388/month Windows and $299 for Linux.

MichaelApproved• 13 years ago

Don't forget to include all the free bandwidth that comes with dedicated hosting plans. With EC2, that's extra and can really make a difference to a lot of companies.

And, with dedicated hardware, you have faster storage with traditional HDD and even SSD. Both those options are faster than EC2 storage.

And, better customer service too.

chetanahuja• 13 years ago

Why is nobody mentioning digital ocean ?

https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing

$80/month

8GB Memory 4 Cores 80GB SSD Disk 5TB Transfer

23david• 13 years ago

If cash cost is your only consideration it might make sense to look outside of AWS. One of the big issues I see is that the feature-set and global footprint of AWS is pretty much unmatched.

The really sad part (for AWS competitors) is that once you get into reserved instance pricing and spot pricing, it removes a lot of the cost difference. The competition is years behind, and getting further behind every month.

But that's looking at it from just a cash perspective. If your time is worth money (and you have funding), setting up things on AWS will save you a ton of money since you can take advantage of pretty good services like RDS, ELB, Elasticache, SQS, Route53, etc that will allow you to get your product to market faster with a smaller team.

adambard• 13 years ago

If you just want to swing numbers around, for $500/month you can get a bare-metal Xeon with 8 cores, 32GB of RAM, and 1.6 TB of storage from Storm on Demand: https://www.stormondemand.com/servers/baremetal.html#showsig...

The startup I'm at has looked at using AWS and repeatedly decided against it based on cost. It's simply much more expensive compared to dedicated hardware when you need a single high-performance box -- and you should be able to serve a whole fuckton of traffic an 8-cpu 32GB box if you try.

lobster_johnson3• 13 years ago

A server with 1 CPU and 8GB of RAM starts at $399

No, it starts at $219. You can add more RAM to any of their hardware options. So the cheapest 1CPU-box is $159 plus $60/mo for the RAM upgrade.

By the way, Hetzner is very good, and the connectivity to the US is great. Visitors would not notice the extra couple of routing hops.

dangrossman• 13 years ago

EDIT: Thanks for the suggestions to look at Softlayer. A server with 1 CPU and 8GB of RAM starts at $399, which is better than Rackspace, but not exactly orders of magnitude cheaper than the c1.xlarge I mentioned above.

You need to negotiate. The advertised prices are starting points for talking to sales, not what you really have to pay.

You can get a 2011-gen quad-core Xeon with 16GB RAM for $250/mo or thereabouts at Softlayer.

lamnk• 13 years ago

If you need raw performance, have a look at WebNX, they are specialized in high end dedicated servers, boxes with Xeon E5 and 64GB RAM are in the range $150-$200. I find Softlayer or Rackspace quite overpriced.

There are many other smaller hosting companies that offer good services and pricing. You just need to do some researchs.

adventured• 13 years ago

Your comparison is bogus.

I've used a very reputable host by the name of WebNX out of Los Angeles for a long time. They blow your referenced prices out of the water.

How does this sound?

Intel Xeon 1230 v3; 32gb ram; 4x 1TB 7,200 rpm enterprise hdd w/ hardware raid 10; 20tb of outbound bandwidth; unmetered inbound bandwidth; $239

Or swap out the 4x drives for 512 ssd and 1tb 7200rpm, for $199 instead.

That v3 1230 pushes 9500 on passmark.

Back to AWS? Not a chance.

toble2• 13 years ago

As others have said, Rackspace is very high end. There are lots of well regarded providers in the middle that offer excellent customer service.

ancarda• 13 years ago

Recommended reading if your considering co-locating instead of AWS: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/10/building-servers-fo... -- It compares prices (now somewhat out of date) vs performance.

druiid4• 13 years ago

I'd say it's vastly out of date now. You can squeeze a LOT into new Dell/HP 1U/2U servers. Their R620 systems can take nearly a terabyte (768GB) of memory per server and the R720 can do the same, but with the 720XD it can do 24 drives in a single 2U space. Top that off with the newer Intel processors and you have a huge amount of hardware available to you in not a very large amount of space.

dasil003• 13 years ago

There is a tremendous value add from the whole AWS package, so naturally you are going to overpay a lot if you compare on raw power alone. AWS allows you to not purchase backup hardware, it allows you to shape your stack to your load profile on demand rather than purchasing hardware and potentially making a long-term commitment that is wrong, it allows you to handle load spikes very easily and inexpensively, and it allows you control everything from a robust API, and it's big and stable enough where you don't usually have to fight for and be disappointed by support: problems tend to be large and affecting everyone, or small and you just boot a new instance.

So what if you're spending $25k a year where a colo'd rack would be only $5k, that's not your major cost center in a startup (or any business for that matter). If you are utilizing the benefits of AWS it could well tip the scales in terms of not needing to have a $150k systems engineer.

x0x02• 13 years ago

from a former employer who wants to stay anonymous, ec2 bill per month: $97k peak, softlayer: $26k. 1/3 the cost, 2x the performance.

And let's not mention emr; a $15k/mo cluster in softlayer did something like 5x the performance of an emr cluster that was costing (and running!) $2k/day.

tchock23• 13 years ago

On your point about lack of pricing transparency and inability to forecast costs with AWS, check out CloudCheckr. It helped us get much better visibility into our AWS costs. I still feel like I'm overpaying with AWS, but at least I have better visibility into where and how I'm overpaying...

verelo2• 13 years ago

10k, 50k, heck even 100k a year should be nothing to your startup. That's the cost of one good developer. Focus your cost savings in other areas, if 100k is the kind of optimization you need to make (and you're actually spending 100k a year on virtual hardware) then you have other problems.

arjie2• 13 years ago

One good developer adds one good developer worth of value. Overpaying 100k is definitely a bad idea because you aren't getting the 100k of value.

toble2• 13 years ago

Agreed. I have been running dedicated servers for years and stayed well away from Amazon due to price calculations, it's such a huge difference in price.

When I worked at start-up the lead dev seemed to be heavily bought into the hype of "cloud" hosting, so he used Engine Yard. The founders got freaked out at the cost for what was negligible traffic. We then moved to Amazon, which equally freaked them out.

If you don't have money to burn, then consider going down the standard hosting route.

VeejayRampay• 13 years ago

I always wonder how a company can offer such a rebate without giving direct insight about how exactly their prices were absolutely outrageous and completely uncorrelated with the offered value to begin with.

People who were paying full price prior to this rebate must feel pretty annoyed right now.

hkmurakami2• 13 years ago

I think you mean uncorrelated with the underlying cost of the service. If the price were uncorrelated with the value, people wouldn't have subscribed to AWS in the first place?

steveklabnik2• 13 years ago

First rule of pricing: price to value, not to cost.

People are used to the prices of things going down as economies of scale kick in. That doesn't mean it actually _happened_ here, but if you were already a happy customer at $100/month, when next month comes around and it's $20, you're just more happy.

hkmurakami2• 13 years ago

exactly. The only reason Amazon is now lowering its price is due to competition. If not for competition they'd keep prices stable or even try to increase it. (like they're going to start doing with books)

Just one reason competition is generally good for consumers, even though on a macro level one could argue that competition is inefficient.

toyg• 13 years ago

It's weird how people still struggle to understand that one should always price according to what a customer is willing to pay, rather than some sort of magic formula "price = cost + socially-acceptable-profit". I thought Apple and Starbucks had made it so brazenly obvious even to the layman.

adamseabrook6• 13 years ago

My company runs a largish crawling infrastructure. We evaluated Amazon extensively but just could not make the price/performance calculation stack up. If you have lots of "always on" gear dedicated works out significantly cheaper. We have boxes with 256GB of RAM, 300mbps network pipes for under $330 per month and we don't have to share any CPU or Disk I/O.

MagicWishMonkey• 13 years ago

Likewise. My company decided to lease a rack at a colo, unlimited bandwidth (practically speaking) and we can add capacity as necessary.

We're planning to (eventually) utilize Amazon to temporarily add capacity when necessary, but it will never be our primary hosting solution.

adamseabrook6• 13 years ago

That is the one thing we do miss. Elastically scaling dedicated boxes that can often take 12 hours from order to go live means we end up with a few hot spares laying about just in case but overall it is still cheaper.

beachstartup• 13 years ago

with amazon you're paying for software, not hardware. big difference.

druiid4• 13 years ago

Yep. Many businesses should (and a lot don't...) make this cost comparison. Also, 256GB of memory in a server is surprisingly not that impressive (even for a 1U server) these days! Crazy to think there are 1U machines you can cram 1TB of memory into now.

darkarmani2• 13 years ago

Wow. That's a lot of bandwidth. I re-wrote the downloaders for siteadvisor a few years ago (hosted) and they didn't need anything close to that. They were just downloading EXEs and other content from pages the crawlers had already seen, but still.

adamseabrook6• 13 years ago

Those servers run our ElasticSearch index so move TB of data around inside the network and out to customers. Our actual crawlers could happily sip from a 5mbps pipe.

benmccann• 13 years ago

What hosting provider are you using?

adamseabrook6• 13 years ago

We use OVH in Montreal.

Vitaly• 13 years ago

Now I wander if Heroku prices will follow or if they'll decide to just pocket the difference themselves.

rschmitty• 13 years ago

Does heroku run on the dedicated servers?

Dedicated being different from 100% utilization reserved servers

http://aws.amazon.com/dedicated-instances/ vs http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/ (which did not get 80% cuts)

brentm• 13 years ago

I'd think they would employ dedicated instances which they then subdivide to keep their customers as isolated as possible.

wilfra• 13 years ago

Have been on Heroku for about two years and can't recall a single price reduction in anything. I think it's pretty clear that pocketing the difference in the steady AWS price reductions is exactly what Heroku does.

EamonLeonard2• 13 years ago

Disclosure: I work for Engine Yard.

We've dropped our prices a number of times, the lastest a few months ago:

https://blog.engineyard.com/2013/announcing-lower-pricing

cowsandmilk• 13 years ago

I highly doubt Heroku pays list price for their servers. Any public EC2 price change is probably mostly irrelevant to them, other than as a baseline for their negotiations.

fomb• 13 years ago

Heroku don't use these.

forlorn• 13 years ago

One would think why Digital Ocean is first to come to my mind.

wheaties• 13 years ago

That was my first thought. DO gives SSD drives. That's a pretty enticing offer, in and of itself. The only downside is that it appears that a lot of SaaS providers are already on Amazon, meaning your network times more than likely benefit. Would love to hear about more people on both.

AndyKelley• 13 years ago

I saw this article in hacker news today, and noticed somebody mentioning digital ocean. I switched one of my servers over to digital ocean to try it out.

The process was smooth and enjoyable, and now I'm spending less than half as much as I was with EC2.

I even got to try their recovery console after I mistakenly deleted the root password without first giving myself sudo. Worked like a charm.

amorphid• 13 years ago

It wouldn't surprise me to see Digital Ocean get picked up by Amazon at some point. Amazon loves a high growth, low margin business model.

rorrr22• 13 years ago

Prices are still ridiculous. Compare it with something like Hetzner:

https://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produkte_rootserver/ex4

https://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produkte_rootserver/ex10

noir_lord• 13 years ago

I'm a recent Hetzner customer.

32Gb/i7.

I used them for 5 weeks, in that five week period I had 5 1-2 day blocks where the machine was unreachable.

A incoming attack influence the network for few minutes. The network department has solved the issue.

few minutes was 31 hours

our network-team told us, that there was again an attack which caused the issues you mentioned.

27 hours

currently we can't see any issue, is this still given?

connection timed out (no idea how long as I'd not installed monitoring at that point).

etc etc.

I canceled shortly after.

I'm back on Linode for now (I actually changed the design of the product I'm developing so that I can store files onto S3 so I can stay with Linode and move easily in the future).

A fast server is a paperweight without reliable network access.

petercooper2• 13 years ago

Just as a counter point, I'm both a Linode and Hetzner user and am happy with both. My Hetzner server has had solid service for about 18 months now (with a couple of brief restarts in there) and certainly no prolonged outages.

I am not particularly keen to move entirely to them, however, as I just have a gut feeling I'd prefer to have the service of someone like Linode in a true emergency. As a high powered server for experiments, side projects or things that don't demand 100% uptime (e.g. my company's collaboration software), however, Hetzner has proven superb so far.

return02• 13 years ago

i host a few sites with moderate traffic on an ex10 server. I can't remember of any network issues. Current uptime:

12:13:14 up 183 days, 21:23, 2 users, load average: 0.51, 0.55, 0.49

The problem is unreliability of hardware. When one of the hard disks broke in the previous server, it was faster to setup a new server to transfer everything rather than waiting for the repair.

ericd4• 13 years ago

Is there a Hetzner equivalent in the US or Canada?

petercooper2• 13 years ago

I've been keeping my eyes peeled for one and.. there are actually several. http://netdepot.com/ is the one I've come closest to ordering from so far but I haven't yet done so. I like that they do "buy downs" where you can pay for extra hardware up front though. It's not quite as cheap as Hetzner but it's not miles away.

Others on my radar are https://hivelocity.net and http://www.100tb.com/ - at the VPS level, http://buyvm.net/ and http://prgmr.com/xen/ are both cheap for the quality you appear to get (but I can't yet vouch for this directly).

adamseabrook6• 13 years ago

OVH has very similar prices and you can peep at their http://status.ovh.com/ to see how they have been going with uptime.

StavrosK2• 13 years ago

I had a Hetzner server and was very very satisfied both by the performance and the price. Does anyone know a comparable offering in the US, for people who want servers there? I think I heard OVH?

nolok• 13 years ago

Yes OVH should give you the same sort of things, and they now have an american datacenter (you can chose which datacenter you want your servers to be in when ordering)

papsosouid3• 13 years ago

So, I have to be cool with having terrible reliability, no durability, no services I rely on (SQS, S3, EBS), increased latency for my users (our userbase is 99% north american), and extended downtimes anytime anything goes wrong with hardware, networking, etc? Maybe there's a reason for the price difference?

jessaustin2• 13 years ago

Dude, I thought you kept everything on a single "big iron" server? Why are you using AWS?

manishsharan• 13 years ago

Can someone please advise what is the most cost optimal way running MongoDB on AWS ? I am bootstrapping/coding/testing and all these options make my head spin. My web application would be running on AWS Elastic Beanstalk and they would be using the MongoDB.

a-priori• 13 years ago

Honestly? I wouldn't. My first choice would be to use a service like https://www.mongohq.com to manage it for you.

flyt3• 13 years ago

AWS recently released a whitepaper describing the best practices for doing just this: http://media.amazonwebservices.com/AWS_NoSQL_MongoDB.pdf [PDF]

crb• 13 years ago

The 80% number was for a "dedicated instance". A dedicated instance is not the same as a reserved instance.

Dedicated instances, charged on top of the regular price, are where you are guaranteed not to have anyone else on the same host server as you. Dedicated instances already cost 10% more than their regular counterparts (small/dedicated/on-demand costs 6.6/c hr vs 6c/hr.)

At any point, the most you could be "wasting", was the leftover capacity on a host that only had one small server on it (they didn't do micro). Imagine a simplified version of EC2 as per [1], which fits 12 small instances on one physical host, and you could therefore be wasting 11 slots that you could run a m1.small in. They can't sell these to any other customer. If you buy a second instance, they put that on your first host; you are now wasting 10 slots. Carry on down to when you fill up your first host and spill over onto a second, back to wasting 11 slots.

Previously they were charging $10/hour for those wasted 11 slots, which you could have filled by paying 72.6c/hr. Now, they're only charging $2.

[1] http://perfcap.blogspot.co.uk/2011/03/understanding-and-usin...

Ihmahr2• 13 years ago

It chocks me that no one mentions that these instances run on dirty coal plants.

tnuc• 13 years ago

What should they run on? Unicorn sparkles?

Ihmahr2• 13 years ago

Quick google: http://www.idownloadblog.com/2012/09/14/icloud-solar-farm-ne...

Solar or wind.

Spiritus• 13 years ago

There's plenty of alternatives to coal!

saosebastiao2• 13 years ago

Have you actually read the greenpeace report? Amazon uses less coal than most cloud companies.

_jmar777• 13 years ago

There are a lot of comments about EC2's pricing competitiveness with dedicated hardware. These are fair discussions and should be had, but I figure it's worth commenting that EC2 (and AWS in general) is about much more than cheap metal.

The company that I am a developer at has aggressively adopted AWS with applications using it at both the PaaS and IaaS levels. At the end of the day what we've received the greatest value from isn't an impressive "cost per compute unit", but rather a flexibility that would be incredibly painful to let go of. For example, our QA team can spin up or tear down entire environments by chatting with our Campfire bot. Our developers can do likewise using a simple CLI we built.

Granted, this isn't exactly bleeding edge stuff here... it's simply "the cloud" (apologies) delivering on the promise of dynamic, elastic environments. But it's a really, really nice promise, and at risk of sounding like an advertisement, I'll still say that AWS/EC2 has delivered quite nicely on it.

druiid4• 13 years ago

In all honesty you can get these same benefits from dedicated hardware. Throw openstack or similar on a set of Hetzner or similar machines and have at!

thomaslangston• 13 years ago

Cool, I hope this helps startups that need HIPAA, PCI, and other compliance requirements.

dschiptsov• 13 years ago

“are ideal for workloads where corporate policies or industry regulations require that your EC2 instances be isolated from instances that belong to other customers at the host hardware level.”

What a hypocrisy. This should be read as "polices require that an adequate and predictable I/O performance could be provided".

saosebastiao2• 13 years ago

They market their Provisioned IOPS for that purpose.

ceejayoz• 13 years ago

This is usually a security requirement for big corporations with paranoid legal departments, not a performance requirement.

rch2• 13 years ago

There is a colo in Boulder that will host a Mac mini server for around $75/mo (negotiable). I haven't tried it yet, but I'd imagine that I could get 3-5 'servers' off of eBay and negotiate a nice monthly rate for hosting them.

driverdan• 13 years ago

That doesn't seem like a very good deal. For $75/m you can get a dedicated server with equal or better specs and not worry about owning the hardware.

rch2• 13 years ago

I rather like having a modest collection of hardware that I can call my own. That aside though, is it possible to get a dedicated server with SSD-like disk IO and 8-16 GB of memory for ~75 dollars a month? I admit that I only have experience with Rackspace, and that a few years ago, but it seemed like the pricing was more than twice that.

thezilch• 13 years ago

Source: http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2013/07/09/price-r...

Not to detract from the conversation, but I've pointed out numerous times about techcrunch / this author -- FREDERIC LARDINOIS -- nearly plagiarizing the the entirety of his sources in the many articles, of his, posted here. Maybe it's not strictly plagiarism, but there is almost NEVER value added by his regurgitation. It has got to be etiquette to link to the best source, and Techcrunch has really gone south with the AOL/HuffPo relations -- cheap content rewrites and not a source.

darkarmani2• 13 years ago

Why do they charge the $2/hour dedicated fee for the CC2.8xlarge? Isn't that size already a dedicated instance if you just use it as an on-demand instance? You get 32 virtual cores which makes sense for a dedicated instance, since you get 16 physical cores (2x8) and the hyper-threading makes 32 virtual cores.

"CC2 and CR1 Instances are backed by 2 x Intel Xeon E5-2670 processors, eight-cores with hyperthreading"

Am I missing anything or is there a benefit to doing a dedicated cc2.8xlarge instance? Compliance maybe?

RyanGWU82• 13 years ago

Compliance is the main reason to purchase Dedicated Instances -- maybe the only reason at all. Amazon could always silently introduce better physical hardware, at which point they could put 2+ cc2.8xlarge instances on a physical server. I'm sure there are more m1.smalls on each 2013-era box than there were in 2007.

leef• 13 years ago

There's no guarantee that CC2.8xlarge will own the whole box. It might be that way today, but not if Amazon runs virts on even larger boxes in the future.

lsiebert• 13 years ago

So for the first year, a micro instance is basically free, right? That makes testing aws out super easy for new startups.

Anyone else do something similar? If not, you are going to see people stick with the vendor they know best.

akh• 13 years ago

We're going to update http://www.planforcloud.com to include dedicated instances to help people forecast and compare these to other providers and EC2 purchase options. If you run enough instances, the incremental cost of the regional fee gets diluted and your overall cost is not that much higher than other purchase options.

Amazon Drops Price Of EC2 Dedicated Instances By Up To 80%

Related Stories