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Amazon EC2 Instance Comparison

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Re: Amazon EC2 Instance Comparison

#41

Post by moonboots »

rehack wrote: post #40
moonboots wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reserved instance pricing brings the monthly price down, but for me it's not making ec2 look more appealing. The 3 year price is still 2.5 times the hetzner monthly price after initial setup fees, you lose the ability to autoscale this box, and you are locked-in for 3 years. I would argue a Hetzner box is more like ec2 on demand than reserved because it can be canceled at the end of any month. You can't spin it down…

> I would argue a Hetzner box is more like ec2 on demand than reserved because it can be canceled at the end of any month. Don't agree with this, unless there is hourly billing. As if you just want to try out some thing, say a large instance instead of medium, to just see how it changes something, won't be possible here. edit: would love to know why the down vote?

I'm not arguing that a monthly dedicated server is equal to ec2 on-demand. I'm arguing that it's closer to on-demand than a 3 year plan.

Re: Amazon EC2 Instance Comparison

#42

Post by rehack »

moonboots wrote: post #41
rehack wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would argue a Hetzner box is more like ec2 on demand than reserved because it can be canceled at the end of any month. Don't agree with this, unless there is hourly billing. As if you just want to try out some thing, say a large instance instead of medium, to just see how it changes something, won't be possible here. edit: would love to know why the down vote?

I'm not arguing that a monthly dedicated server is equal to ec2 on-demand. I'm arguing that it's closer to on-demand than a 3 year plan.

Can agree with that. 1 month vs 3 years.

In fact we ourselves, have not been able to go for a reserved instance yet. Although have been thinking about it for an year or so. As there is always a likeliness of going to a bigger configuration in the near future (small->medium or medium->large etc.). So you are not sure if reserving is a good idea.

So you settle for the gains of the on-demand e.g. having more instances in the day

Re: Amazon EC2 Instance Comparison

#43

Post by mryan »

jeffbarr wrote: post #11
dcurtis wrote: post #6

This is awesome. I was starting some instances this morning, and it's shocking how poorly Amazon describes what they offer. I had three browser windows and a calculator open just to figure out which instances are being offered, and at which relative prices. You'd think they would spend more time on this stuff.

What can we do better? What don't we tell you that would help you to make a more informed decision?

Not entirely related to the OP, but I would love to see ssh:// links on the EC2 instance page. It sounds trivial, but being able to click these links to login to an instance (instead of copy hostname, open terminal, paste hostname) would save me a lot of time each day.

Re: Amazon EC2 Instance Comparison

#45

Post by taligent »

moonboots wrote: post #31
taligent wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought it was well known that Amazon is very expensive compared to ANY dedicated hosting provider. But that's not the point of AWS. The point is that you get a PLATFORM as a service. Not just a box. You get an enterprise class queuing, workflow, load balancing, DNS etc all in the one place. Not to mention it's unrivalled auto scaling features.

I think most people realize aws charges a premium for the ability to scale up and down, but at least for me, the magnitude of the price difference was nevertheless surprising. Some of the services Amazon offers will certainly be worth the premium for a subset of customers. However, the price difference makes other features like auto scaling moot because you can overprovision servers at Hetzner and still have a much l…

I know what you mean. I only realised AFTER I had put in the all the effort to deploy my apps.

Actually one of the best ways to go is to find dedicated hosting providers in the same data center. For example Server Beach is faster at accessing Amazon SQS than Amazon EC2 is.

Re: Amazon EC2 Instance Comparison

#46

Post by rehack »

jeffbarr wrote: post #5

Here's a suggestion for a big improvement: Pick apart the EC2 pricing page ( http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/ ) and find the URLs to the JSON (e.g. http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/ri-light-linux.json ) and build something that's totally dynamic. Although the URLs and the formats aren't an official AWS API, I think it is pretty safe to count on them for an application like this.

Hi! Since we get to know that you are from Amazon and listening, will tell you about another situation, which will help me a great deal.

I don't think as of now, I can reserve a smaller configuration and if my need changes can just switch to a bigger reserved configuration. And the billing accommodates for the reserved price which I already paid for the smaller one.

(As a real example, I have medium running all the time, but don't reserve it thinking I may have to move to a large one in the near future. )

Or can I already do this, and it is my bad that I have not noticed? If yes, then please point me to the information about that.

If not, then can you take it as a feature request from me please.

Re: Amazon EC2 Instance Comparison

#47

Post by dbecker »

jeffbarr wrote: post #11
dcurtis wrote: post #6

This is awesome. I was starting some instances this morning, and it's shocking how poorly Amazon describes what they offer. I had three browser windows and a calculator open just to figure out which instances are being offered, and at which relative prices. You'd think they would spend more time on this stuff.

What can we do better? What don't we tell you that would help you to make a more informed decision?

In many ways, I love AWS. But the web page is possibly the least user-friendly page I visit with any frequency.

Even after I am signed into AWS, there are "Sign Up Now" buttons everywhere. So, it's confusing whether or not I am signed in.

I expect the big icon in the upper left to bring me to a useful "home page" like the AWS management console. Instead it brings me to a page that is just a big advertisement (for services I already use.)

I just want to get to my EC2 management console quickly, so I sometimes click on the link that says "Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)."

That brings me to an advertisement page for EC2... again, this is after I'm already signed in and just trying to use the service. That EC2 specific advertising page still doesn't have a direct link to the EC2 management console.

To do anything useful, I need to click on AWS Management Console which only becomes visible after I mouse over "My Account/Console." But the "My Account" link, the only thing on the whole page that I ever want, is in a smaller font than almost everything else on the page.

Eventually, I wrote my own little AWS interface with python & boto just to avoid having to kludge through the web page.

EDIT: I apologize if this is off the topic of how to present pricing. I got excited when I saw an AWS engineer asking "what can we do better"

Re: Amazon EC2 Instance Comparison

#48

Post by zhoutong »

corin_ wrote: post #30
moonboots wrote: post #16

There has been a lot of discussion on HN about dedicated hosting at Hetzner vs Amazon, and while they offer different pros and cons, Amazon appears to be a lot more expensive for comparable or even worse specs. Here's a comparison of two servers that have roughly comparable specs, Amazon High-Memory Double Extra Large and Hetzner ex8s: cpu: hetzner: Intel Xeon E3-1275 (4 physical cores) ec2: 4 virtual cores (13 "ecus…

Slight typo in network - 7euro/TB not 7TB/euro (technically it's €6.90, and you can actually pay €0/TB if you are happy going from 100 to 10 Mbit.

The maximum traffic you can use for 10Mbit is 3TB/month.

Re: Amazon EC2 Instance Comparison

#50

Post by patrickaljord »

moonboots wrote: post #16

There has been a lot of discussion on HN about dedicated hosting at Hetzner vs Amazon, and while they offer different pros and cons, Amazon appears to be a lot more expensive for comparable or even worse specs. Here's a comparison of two servers that have roughly comparable specs, Amazon High-Memory Double Extra Large and Hetzner ex8s: cpu: hetzner: Intel Xeon E3-1275 (4 physical cores) ec2: 4 virtual cores (13 "ecus…

There is also http://ovh.com and they are opening a data center in North America this month.
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