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Cloud server showdown: Amazon AWS EC2 vs. Linode vs. DigitalOcean

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Re: Cloud server showdown: Amazon AWS EC2 vs. Linode vs. DigitalOcean

#71

Post by [deleted] »

corresation wrote: post #52
rschmitty wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This absolutely _is_ true, and in my experience it has been on AWS. Search for past benchmarks on HN for examples. Regardless, we stick to AWS at work for the entire suite. When it comes to my money though, DO is making very large strides imo

Search for past benchmarks on HN for examples Can you provide any more specific search criteria? I've found Amazon instances to be quite consistent. They vary, of course, but quite contrary to your initial statement that they vary wildly , I find the variances quite small, and there isn't a need to constantly hunt for ripe instances. I have absolutely found what you said to be sadly true on quite a few other VM hosts…

[deleted]

Re: Cloud server showdown: Amazon AWS EC2 vs. Linode vs. DigitalOcean

#72

Post by kingkilr »

davidw wrote: post #61
wonnage wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, if these benchmarks are misguided and useless, it is useful to recognize it as such so you don't go out and trade all your EC2 instances for Linodes. "At least we're doing something!" is a silly defense.

They probably have some faults, but the general conclusions smell right to me: I don't think they're in the "really screwed up and wildly misleading" category, but in the "ok, interesting, could use some work though" category.

There is nothing you should be more wary of than a benchmark that matches your pre-existing intuition. It'll lead you to ignore serious methodological issues, without any sound scientific (or any other epistemological) reason. https://speakerdeck.com/alex/benchmarking is a slide deck I gave at my office on how to do better benchmarking

EDIT: I should probably mention I work at Rackspace, and thus everything I say on this subject should be taken with appropriate grains of sand :)

Re: Cloud server showdown: Amazon AWS EC2 vs. Linode vs. DigitalOcean

#73

Post by akurilin »

joevandyk wrote: post #35
akurilin wrote: post #28

What's the recommendation for hosting Postgres on a VPS these days? DigitalOcean doesn't seem to offer NAS drives, and I believe Linode is in the same boat.

Don't use a NAS. Use replication.

Not sure I follow. What do you do if you need more space than what comes with the instance?

Re: Cloud server showdown: Amazon AWS EC2 vs. Linode vs. DigitalOcean

#74

Post by zwily »

imperialWicket wrote: post #63

These are fine benchmarks for consideration, IFF you are interested in using AWS EC2 instances as a vps. This might not be a terrible endeavor, but it's really not the intended use. EBS performance is an issue - Yes it is, don't use EBS. Use instance store and push to S3 for persistence. If you need performance I/O for something, there is likely a separate service available that pushes your I/O bottleneck further awa…

EBS sucks, but EBS+PIOPS is actually pretty great. We've gotten consistent performance well within the guarantees ever since the launch last year. Highly recommended.

On a side note - From a marketing perspective, Amazon probably should have launched PIOPS as a separate product from EBS. The idea that "EBS sucks" is pretty firmly entrenched, so EBS+PIOPS is fighting an uphill battle.

Re: Cloud server showdown: Amazon AWS EC2 vs. Linode vs. DigitalOcean

#75

Post by vosper »

corresation wrote: post #31
bryanlarsen wrote: post #14

Did you try multiple instances on each provider? Performance between VPS's from the same provider varies wildly. If there are 64 VPS's on a server, you will probably get a lot more than 1/64th of the processing power of that server because most of the other VPS's are idle. But how much more than 1/64th you get will vary wildly from machine to machine.

Performance between VPS's from the same provider varies wildly. This absolutely should not be true, and in my experience it isn't true on Amazon -- you will neither be starved for resources if others do intensive things, nor will you enjoy riches if they are quiet: You will get what you are paying for. I have a personal experience from Digital Ocean that is a bit different. Firstly let me say that I think they have a…

One thing to consider is that different instances of the same class may be deployed on widely varying hardware. For c1.xlarge instances we've seen very different cache size and CPU specs (cat /proc/cpuinfo) and now always try to get on the machines with a 20mb cache - our benchmarks show these to be better for our needs.

I have heard anecdotally that it's not uncommon for large players to bulk-start instances and then kill all of the ones that don't have the latest hardware.

Update: I just looked at 4 random c1.xlarge instances we have running, and found 3 different types of underlying hardware:

1. Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5410 @ 2.33GHz w/ 6144kb cache

2. Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5506 @ 2.13GHz w/ 4096kb cache

3. Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2650 0 @ 2.00GHz w/ 20480kb cache

Of these cores, the E5410 is from 2007, E5506 is from 2009 and the E5-2650 is a Sandy Bridge from last year.

Re: Cloud server showdown: Amazon AWS EC2 vs. Linode vs. DigitalOcean

#76

Post by dismiss21x »

okrasz wrote: post #3

There are at least two tools which are very useful in such comparisons - http://www.cloudorado.com for pricing, and http://cloudharmony.com/ for benchmarks.

Your association to Cloudarado isn't fooling anyone: https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=okrasz

Re: Cloud server showdown: Amazon AWS EC2 vs. Linode vs. DigitalOcean

#77

Post by shuzchen »

leetrout wrote: post #51

I am always surprised Rackspace Cloud Servers are left out. We've been using them for over a year with only a handful of outages (VM host reboots- 3~5min each). For us it is worth the price (>$40/mo for 1 GB ram) for great stability and support. The Openstack API is really nice, too.

I've used Rackspace cloud both when it used to be called Slicehost and after the full transition to the Rackspace brand. In my experience past and present, you get a better deal dollar for dollar with Linode (better disk, network, and cpu performance). Personally, the only reason I'd use Rackspace cloud would be as a part of their hybrid offering.

Re: Cloud server showdown: Amazon AWS EC2 vs. Linode vs. DigitalOcean

#78

Post by oogali »

davidw wrote: post #55
oogali wrote: post #47

sigh I call these "weekend benchmarks" -- what you'd typically do when you have a block of free time, then spend time optimizing for said benchmark. Roll in on Monday with some staggering results, only to find one (or many) of your variables were off. Did the author try multiple instances on each provider? VM tenancy is a bitch. (Think of how annoyed you get at the noise levels, when your neighbor in the next apartme…

Do you have something better to point to? It's easy to complain about stuff, but at least he's out there trying to do something. Presumably it can be improved. I'm particularly fond of the quote "lead, follow, or get the hell out of the way", which is a bit harsh in this case because a lot of your advice is good. It could be framed in a more constructive way, though - there's some Comic Book Guy tone there in your co…

Seriously?

My intended tone was not "don't try", but "try harder".

I've listed at least 5 ways to improve/normalize the testing, as well as linking to a document that does a pretty good job of explaining statistics (particularly, how programmers do a bad job of statistics; baselines for benchmarks; etc).

"At least he's out there trying" -- with this not-so-great benchmarking, the author has just effectively SHITTED on 2/3 companies that have gone to great lengths to build amazing infrastructure AND managed to spread his FUD around the web, to the point where it reached the HN front page -- and you want credit for trying?

Get the hell out of the way.

Re: Cloud server showdown: Amazon AWS EC2 vs. Linode vs. DigitalOcean

#79

Post by longbeard »

oogali wrote: post #47

sigh I call these "weekend benchmarks" -- what you'd typically do when you have a block of free time, then spend time optimizing for said benchmark. Roll in on Monday with some staggering results, only to find one (or many) of your variables were off. Did the author try multiple instances on each provider? VM tenancy is a bitch. (Think of how annoyed you get at the noise levels, when your neighbor in the next apartme…

If performance is the primary concern you wouldn't pick such small server/instance types to benchmark. It's like organizing a drag race between a scooter, a moped and a kid on a bicycle.

Another major flaw is taking results for a single instance type and implying that those apply to all instance sizes and each provider as a whole.

If you're going to do a benchmark at least pick something realistic like the m3.* types: http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/instance-details/

At least the author had enough sense not to do the bench on a t1.micro

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