Amazon EC2 Instance Comparison

Post by taligent » Fri, Jun 08, 2012, 12:20 PM UTC

cmer wrote: post #57

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…

An Hetzner box is still ~4 times faster despite being so much cheaper. Both the c1.large and m1.xlarge are slower than a decent 9-10 year old server costing less than $100/mo. The same server can be purchased for less than $200 on eBay! See my benchmarks: http://blog.carlmercier.com/2012/01/05/ec2-is-basically-one-...

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Jun 08, 2012, 12:34 PM UTC

notatoad wrote: post #25

jtchang wrote: post #7

I always tell people that EC2 generally costs more than a VPS. They don't believe me until they actually do the calculation. You have to factor in things like bandwidth and storage as well (which is usually included for services like linode or slicehost).

My experience with ec2 is that you get significantly better performance for the price. An ec2 micro is possible to run a webapp with moderate traffic from, a comparably prices VPS migt have similar stated specs but they're all so oversold they can't really be used for anything worthwhile.

Post by jeffbarr » Fri, Jun 08, 2012, 12:58 PM UTC

dbecker wrote: post #47

jeffbarr wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ser…

Post by taligent » Fri, Jun 08, 2012, 1:06 PM UTC

fooyc wrote: post #56

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.

These are not magic features. You still have to make your app scale. And once you did it, it works as well on dedicated servers. Dedicated servers come with dedicated disks or SSDs, memory, CPUs, network cards. Decent dedicated hosting providers deliver new servers in a few hours. And they too provide load balancing, dns, filers, backups, elastic ips, etc. The only difference between AWS or a decent dedicated servers…

Post by slig » Fri, Jun 08, 2012, 1:17 PM UTC

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…