Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Amazon EC2 Instance Comparison

ec2instances.info

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 98 posts

Re: Amazon EC2 Instance Comparison

#71

Post by pearle »

jeffbarr wrote: post #15
dcurtis wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it would make sense to merge the pricing and instance type sections (in a similar way to the linked page), and to also have all of that information in the new instance flow of the management console. It would also be great if you could show estimated monthly/weekly pricing for each instance type, with comparisons for reserved and on demand versions.

That's excellent feedback. I will make sure that the team is aware of it tomorrow morning.

I agree with the GP. I'm currently planning out a migration to EC2 for my company and having all this information in one place would be a great help.

Re: Amazon EC2 Instance Comparison

#72

Post by wpietri »

jeffbarr wrote: post #65
dbecker wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Thank you, this is awesome. I'll be sharing this thread around the office in a few hours.

As long as you're collecting feedback, please have the console default to an interesting page. 98% of the time I'm opening it, I go to look at the instances tab. Then I experience a brief moment of panic when it shows I have no instances, because it shows some region other than the one with my servers.

Re: Amazon EC2 Instance Comparison

#73

Post by moonboots »

taligent wrote: post #61
cmer wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-...

Actually you didn't even pick the best benchmark. Almost all dedicated servers support AES-NI which can make a staggering difference to your site's SSL performance. This is not available to EC2 AFAIK. http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/clarkdale-aes-ni-encrypt... http://forum.nginx.org/read.php?2,181676

It should be noted that the AES-NI TLS speedup only occurs if you are using AES. If you are using RC4 (Google and Facebook use this), you won't benefit from the new cpu instruction. Here's another useful TLS benchmark I came across:

http://zombe.es/post/4078724716/openssl-cipher-selection

Re: Amazon EC2 Instance Comparison

#74

Post by [deleted] »

rehack wrote: post #33
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…

Looking at it this way, the price difference does look staggering. And I am happy that Hetzner kind of dedicated hosting services will keep EC2 kind of cloud hosting services honest. We moved from a dedicated service to EC2 in 2010. At the time got some 30/40% drop in the hosting cost for the same traffic. As apart from marginally less hosting price, it also allowed us to start some instances in the day time and shut…

[deleted]

Re: Amazon EC2 Instance Comparison

#75

Post by Goladus »

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…

I've been using aws for awhile so I've gotten used to the sign-in part and never have trouble getting to the console.

Where I get lost is trying to find the reference documentation as opposed to the newbie guides or the architecture overviews. Scenarios similar to: "crap it's been a year and a half since I've bundled a new AMI and I forgot the exact steps" where I need to look up some detail of the API. That's where I wind up going to google to search the amazon site for the docs I need.

Re: Amazon EC2 Instance Comparison

#76

Post by moonboots »

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-...

I first heard about Hetzner when your blog post was submitted to HN. While some HN commenters claimed the title was linkbait, I think it's legitimate (though biased). Amazon can charge what they want, and you can call them out if there are significant performance/price discrepancies.

Re: Amazon EC2 Instance Comparison

#78

Post by pella »

ben1040 wrote: post #2

Nice. Would be extra useful to see reserved instance pricing on here too.

another useful info for RAID0 is the disk strorage number:

2 disk: m2.4xlarge : 1680 GiB instance storage (2 x 840 GiB)

4 disk: c1.xlarge : 1680 GiB instance storage (4 x 420 GiB)

more info:

http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/in...

and a quick start: "RAID0 ephemeral storage on AWS EC2"

http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2011/05/raid0-ephemeral-...

Re: Amazon EC2 Instance Comparison

#79

Post by giulianob »

rehack wrote: post #33
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…

Looking at it this way, the price difference does look staggering. And I am happy that Hetzner kind of dedicated hosting services will keep EC2 kind of cloud hosting services honest. We moved from a dedicated service to EC2 in 2010. At the time got some 30/40% drop in the hosting cost for the same traffic. As apart from marginally less hosting price, it also allowed us to start some instances in the day time and shut…

EC2 can be cost effective if your traffic throughout the day spikes A LOT.

As for the experimenting part, you could build yourself your own VM cluster. There are a lot of prepackaged solutions such as oVirt which come with the full administration suite and some even come with the preconfigured OS. It really isn't very complicated and you get predictable performance on modern hardware.

Re: Amazon EC2 Instance Comparison

#80

Post by comatose_kid »

patrickaljord wrote: post #50
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.

Next month? Where did you hear that?
Post reply on HN