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Rubygems.org AWS bill for Feb 2014 [pdf]

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Re: Rubygems.org AWS bill for Feb 2014 [pdf]

#11
post #9

At a glance, this looks like AWS being used like a dedicated host, which as demonstrated, isn't exactly cheap. There's no spot or even reserved pricing, just a bunch of on-demand instances that were up 24/7 for all 28 days in February. Seems like a genuine dedicated host, reserved instances or an architecture that leverages the elastic in elastic compute cloud would be worth considering.

A lot of the price is bandwidth. They are effectively being reamed by using CloudFront instead of negotiating a better rate with a "real" CDN (which will also give then much better performance, as CloudFront doesn't have many edge locations).

(Although, actually, while I verified their total dollars spent is greater than what would be required to get a fundamentally better deal on bandwidth, I didn't take into consideration that once you slash their costs the amount they would be paying might no longer be ;P.)

Re: Rubygems.org AWS bill for Feb 2014 [pdf]

#13
post #10

The thing is there are many providers who can do the same and most of them will do it for less than half of this. Some less than 1/5th. I think they should move this to Digital Ocean and save $5000. The bias towards AWS for this type of application is ridiculous and a big waste of money.

Whenever anybody makes this type of statement, I'm alway interested in knowing if they've ever run a site with this type of traffic, and this many customers.

In particular, have you ever run a site that consistently serves over 25 Terabytes of traffic/month, or have you worked with someone who has?

I guarantee you that no company I have worked for in the last 15 years, could have ever run this type of infrastructure for $7K/month. Its absolutely amazing.

Re: Rubygems.org AWS bill for Feb 2014 [pdf]

#14
post #10

The thing is there are many providers who can do the same and most of them will do it for less than half of this. Some less than 1/5th. I think they should move this to Digital Ocean and save $5000. The bias towards AWS for this type of application is ridiculous and a big waste of money.

It's often difficult to migrate providers when the application is complex or the owners may see the value in the provider. They're falling right into the hands of most cloud providers evil plans, they make it cheap to get started but as time moves on, it becomes more difficult to migrate away.

Re: Rubygems.org AWS bill for Feb 2014 [pdf]

#16
post #10

The thing is there are many providers who can do the same and most of them will do it for less than half of this. Some less than 1/5th. I think they should move this to Digital Ocean and save $5000. The bias towards AWS for this type of application is ridiculous and a big waste of money.

> The bias towards AWS for this type of application is ridiculous and a big waste of money.

They could get an even better deal by just going through a dedicated server provider (or even better, colocating).

There's little advantage with choosing DO versus going with a dedicated server provider (and again, colocating). I guess the advantage would be the control panel that they wouldn't use, having a few one-click stacks that they won't use, stuff like that.

If someone can afford a $7,000 AWS bill they can afford to put some money towards hardware and an onApp license if they want "cloudy" stuff. To colocate their hardware it would probably run them anywhere from $400-$800 a month depending on where they go. Their total bill would be decreased by $5500 a month. The upfront investment of the hardware wouldn't be more than $12,000 either. LOE? Probably two weeks with a competent sysadmin.

Yes you can have issues with your hardware and stuff and then you have to take care of that, but if you're good with your DC, they're great to you.

Re: Rubygems.org AWS bill for Feb 2014 [pdf]

#17
post #10

The thing is there are many providers who can do the same and most of them will do it for less than half of this. Some less than 1/5th. I think they should move this to Digital Ocean and save $5000. The bias towards AWS for this type of application is ridiculous and a big waste of money.

Whenever anybody makes this type of statement, I'm alway interested in knowing if they've ever run a site with this type of traffic, and this many customers. In particular, have you ever run a site that consistently serves over 25 Terabytes of traffic/month, or have you worked with someone who has? I guarantee you that no company I have worked for in the last 15 years, could have ever run this type of infrastructure…

Have you worked for Rackspace, Linode or Digital Ocean?

Re: Rubygems.org AWS bill for Feb 2014 [pdf]

#20
post #10

The thing is there are many providers who can do the same and most of them will do it for less than half of this. Some less than 1/5th. I think they should move this to Digital Ocean and save $5000. The bias towards AWS for this type of application is ridiculous and a big waste of money.

Whenever anybody makes this type of statement, I'm alway interested in knowing if they've ever run a site with this type of traffic, and this many customers. In particular, have you ever run a site that consistently serves over 25 Terabytes of traffic/month, or have you worked with someone who has? I guarantee you that no company I have worked for in the last 15 years, could have ever run this type of infrastructure…

Are you including person costs in that $7k? If so, I totally agree.
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