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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

#83

This is only true with the small instance type though, which is severely CPU handicapped. The larger instances (> medium) get the full CPU throughput. Their "EC2 Compute Unit" rating is mostly marketing, I could never verify it by practice. Some instances with twice the ECU actually give more than twofold performance, while instances with 1 ECU should be renamed to 0,25 ECU. I would expect anyone who works with AWS t…

I am curious about this. No doubt the Amazon small is quite the laggard, but as price and capability scale on each platform, I would be curious to know what the results look like. Secondly, if you wanted to get truly accurate results, doing this same test over an array of provisioned instances would be good, as quality can vary. Still, interesting information nonetheless. Really surprised how much faster Linode was t…

True. EC2 for example has 17 different instance types, but only one was benchmarked in the post.

http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/instance-details/

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

#84
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…

To be fair to Amazon the author should have spun up 100 instances, benchmarked them, and used the fastest one. This is a best practice for AWS.

To me, that's an infrastructure smell.

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

#85
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…

To be fair to Amazon the author should have spun up 100 instances, benchmarked them, and used the fastest one. This is a best practice for AWS.

> To be fair to Amazon the author should have spun up 100 instances, benchmarked them, and used the fastest one. This is a best practice for AWS.

Why choose the fastest one? This would be the least accurate way to give an indication if the performance of AWS instances. A mean, or perhaps median depending on the skew, would be a better choice.

Unless you're saying that the benchmarks on the other servers are effectively cherry picked best results.

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

#87
post #74

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.

I haven't had reason to use it yet, but definitely a valid note. Thanks for the corrective note about EBS, and I'll be a little more cautious with my comments in the future (because I think your marketing note is completely valid).

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

#88
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate on their track records?

[1] - https://blog.linode.com/2013/04/16/security-incident-update/ [2] - http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/03/bitcoins-worth-22800... I believe there may have been other incidents. That said, I still have a number of services running happily on Linode. :)

It's more than just those incidents though. It's about basic security practices. No security audits. Passwords stored in plain text. Major discrepancies in the story from what Linode says versus the hacker specifically around whether the private key was compromised and credit cards stolen.

And it's just a continued pattern of incompetence and cover up.

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

#89
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair to Amazon the author should have spun up 100 instances, benchmarked them, and used the fastest one. This is a best practice for AWS.

To me, that's an infrastructure smell.

How would you ensure that an instance launched on hardware bought 6 months ago is identical to the hardware under an instance launched N years ago and still running? Buy old hardware on eBay to prevent newer hardware introducing variation?

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

#90
Something to consider is that DO doesn't offer internal network IP's. So if you have something like a cache farm, you have to access them via external IP's. Linode is supposed to internal IP's, although some manual tickering is required. I'm not sure about EC2, but I'll assume they do.

On a cost per hour basis, DO is the cheapest. Linode next. And Amazon most expensive.

Also, DO is only located in NY, while the others offer central and west cost locations.

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