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I was attempting to point out that you don't need to use EC2 to get shorter than month-to-month billing these days.
OK I see. But then why not EC2 with per-hour billing?
People use EC2 not because of price but flexibility. A good example: When we launch a product and expect lots of traffic, i can quadruple my server count in a few minutes. Once the event is over with, i can spin them down. I can't do this with traditional hosting.
I agree with that but things are getting better. Providers like Internap exists now which has "instantly provisioned" dedicated hardware and a hosting API ( http://www.internap.com/agile/ ). I personally have not had experience with them but from I can see it seems to be good.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was attempting to point out that you don't need to use EC2 to get shorter than month-to-month billing these days.
OK I see. But then why not EC2 with per-hour billing?
Any argument involving price seems to completely ignore TCO. We are using Heroku for most of our needs and suggest it to all our clients and we couldn't be happier to pay the premium over "expensive" AWS. We save a lot on IT and maintenance. Unless you are paying thousands of dollars per month, or your time is very cheap doing your own servers will cost you more. If AWS were so expensive and "not worth it" what are t…
I use AWS extensively, but to be completely fair, Netflix doesn't really care about operations costs. Yes, seriously. Their media licensing is so much more expensive, they do not optimize bang-for-buck, going as far as using larger instances (to avoid noisy neighbor problems) that are much less cost effective. So while AWS might be completely worth it for some people (it is for us), Netflix isn't the best argument :)…
Considering that they're a publicly traded company, they have a fiduciary duty to watch all costs. Though server costs don't compare in relation to media licensing, I'm sure they pay some attention.
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> 3. Speed is sometimes over-rated. You should be be speedy where it matters more. That is, how fast can you redeploy your entire cloud from scratch in case of a disaster should be more interesting to you than if a webpage takes 20 more ms to get to the browser. In our case, at AWS, it is a matter of Personally, I'd rather have 20ms shaved off my users time than a 20 minute disaster recovery time. Disasters happen pe…
That's perhaps depend on the type of your customers/users, and their priorities. If you have "users", then you might be right, as no harm will be done, if once in a few years, their free service will be shutdown for 18 hours. However, if your customers are running core and critical parts of their business on your system, this part becomes a significant factor in the equation.
My nontechnical boss doesn't know about the 20ms difference (thinks her computer is slow?) but an outage is visible like the difference between day and night.
1. AWS beats all others when it comes to security [1]. 2. EC2 is just one item in the package called AWS. Hence, if you just build something more than just "web-app with *db" at the back-end, say a full blown platform, then I know no other option for you to get the full stack integrated API for Data-warehouse, DNS, Load-balancing, auto-scaling, billing, etc. 3. Speed is sometimes over-rated. You should be be speedy w…
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EC2 is more expensive than renting dedicated hardware. Housing/power/cooling/networking/etc are all built-in to that price, not added costs. Colocating your own hardware is not the only option. You can provision someone else's dedicated hardware in under an hour, all costs included, with 24/7 on-site staff to handle failed components or other issues (which again are included in the price).
I'm speccing out some things I host on AWS on softlayer's dedicated hosting, and I'm not coming up with vastly cheaper prices there either. I can get big (compared to ec2) servers cheap but storage costs eat up most of the advantage.
Those are specials but their pricing in general is very good. SoftLayer has some great stuff most hosts don't have but you pay for it.
Do the small ec2 instances have the same performance problems as the micros? I just told my boss the other day I wasnt comfortable usings micros in production. Surely the smalls perform better?
On top of paying 8x what it cost before/after I moved from/back to Softlayer, AWS services just didn't work right. EBS failed often. RDS, which runs on top of EBS, would fail often too. When an entire AZ failed, despite paying double the hourly rate for "Multi-AZ" instances that were supposed to automatically fail over to another zone, nothing failed over, it just failed. If I need on-demand instances these days, I'l…
AWS does per-hour billing, so you definitely do not have to commit to a month for on-demand instances.