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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

#11

Post by niel »

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…

> AFAICT, Linode doesn't offer that, and they probably won't.

While perhaps not entirely as mature and full featured as AWS's offering, Linode does offer an api with which you can script creation/initialization of test servers.

See https://www.linode.com/api/linode

They also offer something called StackScript, that to me looks like some kind of configuration management script. https://www.linode.com/stackscripts/

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

#12

Post by trevoro »

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…

Actually, linode has an API but doesn't do metered billing - thats really what you want for your particular use case.

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

#14

Post by bryanlarsen »

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.

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

#15

Post by peterjmit »

trevoro wrote: post #12
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…

Actually, linode has an API but doesn't do metered billing - thats really what you want for your particular use case.

Digital ocean has an API (I provision servers with Chef) and does hourly billing.

Obviously the API isn't as mature - but it is going in the right direction

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

#16

Post by ceejayoz »

trebor wrote: post #10
throwit1979 wrote: post #4

...and the author is using Laravel, which delivers stunningly terrible latency and throughput performance in the techempower benchmarks: http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/ Would be nice to see similar benchmarks using a framework that doesn't resemble a honeypot's tarpit.

Hi. Laravel user/contributor here. I suggest you try the framework before judging it based on a benchmark . Not sure about their system/code, but a large production application with APC (Laravel 3.2.14, just like the benchmark) has a latency of 90-120ms, and some of those pages are pretty complex.

Laravel 4 appears to have done some massive cleaning up, too, if my test install's memory usage and files included counts are accurate.

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

#17

Post by bryanlarsen »

trevoro wrote: post #12
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…

Actually, linode has an API but doesn't do metered billing - thats really what you want for your particular use case.

Linode does do metered billing. If you take down a node, you get credit for the leftover days in your billing cycle. The big difference is that they prorate by day rather than by second.

Digital Ocean does do metered billing, and their API is very sweet & simple.

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

#18

Post by patja »

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.

Those are interesting sites but I didn't see Digital Ocean in their benchmarks or lists of offerings. Seems like a big omission.

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

#19

Post by mark_l_watson »

Well, AWS does have some very useful value add services: Elastic MapReduce, S3, and DynamoDB being my favorites.

Way back when, Amazon gave me about $1200 of free use credits over a two year period, and I played, experimented, used it for most customer projects, etc. I also used AWS for almost all of my own projects.

In the last year or two however, I have started going back to renting large VPS by the month (I use RimuHosting, but there are a lot of good providers) because you get so much more capabilities for the same amount of money.

A little off topic, but another way I have found to save money is to wean myself off of Heroku by taking the little bit of time to set up a git commit/push hook to automatically deploy my web apps. I was using a manual deployment scheme before that took me a minute for each deployment - not so good.

All that said, AWS is really awesome for some jobs like periodically crunching data with MapReduce, etc. I bought a very useful little book "Programming Amazon EC2" a few years ago, and I recommend that as a good reference for using the AWS APIs.

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

#20

Post by mark_l_watson »

mark_l_watson wrote: post #19

Well, AWS does have some very useful value add services: Elastic MapReduce, S3, and DynamoDB being my favorites. Way back when, Amazon gave me about $1200 of free use credits over a two year period, and I played, experimented, used it for most customer projects, etc. I also used AWS for almost all of my own projects. In the last year or two however, I have started going back to renting large VPS by the month (I use R…

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