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

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

remcobron.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 116 posts

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

#91

Post by mark_l_watson »

Ixiaus wrote: post #26
mark_l_watson wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BTW, I wrote up how I use git commit/push hooks for deploying http://blog.markwatson.com/2013/06/automating-clojure-web-ap...

Using a VCS as your deployment strategy is The Wrong Way to do it. I won't go into it in this comment because it's been beaten to death and you can find information about deployments everywhere; even the commenter on your blog post makes a better suggestion than your VCS deployment strategy. Continuous integration, source/binary distributions, automated provisioning, sandboxing, versioning, etc...; it's all out there…

For a lot of cases, you are correct that continuous testing, integration, deployment is the way to go, especially when deployed systems have many moving parts. However for small projects, mimicking a Heroku style of testing locally, commit changes, and use git hooks for deployment seems like a good solution.

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

#92

Post by barista »

kingkilr wrote: post #72
davidw wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Well AWS is slow is not surprise, there was an article on HN in last couple of weeks that pitted Azure against AWS and AWS was faster hands down. So this is no surprise at least to me.

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

#94

Post by ww520 »

tyw wrote: post #70
ww520 wrote: post #62

One of downsides of AWS is the bandwidth cost. It's 5x to 10x more expensive. Running heavy media based websites is just not feasible.

you wouldn't want to do this straight out of EC2, but once you add S3=>CloudFront to the mix it's much less bad. Only thing you want to be serving from your EC2 boxes and load balancer is gzipped HTML/CSS/JS (could even do CSS/JS on S3/CF if you wanted).

Doesn't CloudFront have the same outgoing bandwidth charge? $0.12/GB? CloudFront does have caching and lessen load on EC2 boxes.

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

#95

Post by tharshan09 »

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…

That was a nice article. Any more like it?

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

#96

Post by garretruh »

henryw wrote: post #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 other…

DO actually offers both San Francisco and Amsterdam locations in addition to New York.

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

#97

Post by j-kidd »

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…

http://blog.sciencelogic.com/netflix-steals-time-in-the-clou...

tl;dr: Netflix kills slow performing AWS machines due to resource contention

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

#98

Post by ignostic »

oogali wrote: post #78
davidw wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

It's true: you don't say something like "Well, Amazon just sucks." without backing the statement up with something more credible. As someone a little less savvy on the topic I'm glad to know that the test wasn't even close to the final word and why. Thank you.

It's probably also true that your tone is more abrasive than it needs to be.

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

#99

Post by DrStalker »

pjungwir wrote: post #22
mgkimsal wrote: post #5

Yes, amazon is 'overpriced' if what you're looking at is CPU or disk speed (which is not a bad metric, really). Where amazon shines is the amount of programmatic interaction you can do with it - have build scripts kick off an EC2 instance to run tests, send reports, shut it down. Programmatically bring up more instances during peak times, spin them down at night, etc. AFAICT, Linode doesn't offer that, and they proba…

The other thing Amazon offers is investor confidence. I've worked with several clients who could save tons of money every month by going to Linode, DO, etc., but stay with Amazon (or Heroku) because they feel it reassures investors they are following "best practices." I can understand lots of reasons not to switch, e.g. just having higher priorities, but this reason seems particularly silly.

For us another AWS benefit is the have a datacentre in Australia which is essential for us - storing our data overseas would require all sorts of extra legal hassle. Any performance boost from a different provider would be lost due to the extra network latency getting to the US.

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

#100

Post by _delirium »

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…

I would guess Amazon moves things around more, but most VPS providers, which target more the usecase of you running a VPS 24/7/365, put you on a server and leave you there, rather than rebalancing for load (migrating a live guest transparently isn't that easy).

They should still set things up so you get reasonable baseline performance, even in the high-contention case, rather than overselling the resources. But you can end up with quite a bit of performance variance in the upwards "more than your fair share" direction, especially for I/O, if your neighbors are quiet. If you're on a 32-guest machine where everyone else is idling on IRC or doing nothing, you get a whole disk to yourself; if everyone is doing random alternating reads and writes, you get a 1/32 of a thrashing disk's worst-case throughput. Usually you get something in between.

Post reply on HN