Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not that silly when you consider the security track record of AWS compared to Linode.
Can you elaborate on their track records?
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Cloud server showdown: Amazon AWS EC2 vs. Linode vs. DigitalOcean
111–116 of 116 posts
Re: Cloud server showdown: Amazon AWS EC2 vs. Linode vs. DigitalOcean
#112Oh, I'm too late to the party.) Nevertheless, virtualization is not for production.) Even para- or hvm. I/O is a bottleneck.
Linode is just plain xen, and domUs packed not so tightly, so it performs more or less quickly if other instances are 100% idle.)
The main assumption about virtualization is that there is no two high load domU instances running in parallel, same scenario as it was with primitive apache virtual host based hostings - we could pack them tightly, each one have 100 requests per week on average.
So, virtualization works fine for almost always idle development servers, but everything would fall apart in a I/O intense production environment.
The mantra is "I/O request should be separated and data partitioned". In case of cheap virtualized "servers" storage is the first bottleneck, because you share it with other domUs. Once they're idle, you're OK. Should one next to you running, say, a torrent tracker - you're screwed.
It doesn't matter what you're running under - Xen or just FreeBSD's jails (still love them). The problem is that a HDD could perform only one operation (read or write) at a time.) So, your dom0 is deeply in IOwait, and your, say, mysql on domU locked all your tables, waiting for insert/update completion.
I could write a brochure, but in short - virtualization on productions is the same unnecessary complications as a Java Virtual Machine. They are nice toys, but in production everything is better without them.)
Re: Cloud server showdown: Amazon AWS EC2 vs. Linode vs. DigitalOcean
#113Yes, 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…
I think a lot of people think of the benefits of AWS is that it is the cloud and therefore infinascale. The thing that I see most frequently is that there are generally a minimum number of servers that always need to be on, then if needed, spin up some temporary servers to fill the short term spike. It is not trivial to write this kind of automated autoscaling, and I would wager that a lot of companies that have not heavily invested in their dynamic resource allocation scripts are not really benefiting from AWS the way they think they should.
While it is cool that AWS has a ton of services they offer, I do not like the vendor lockin that comes with AWS services. I think it is generally a better strategy to go with something OpenStack based. That way you can use your own hardware and dynamically provision new nodes in "the cloud" with companies like HP, RackSpace, and others. With modern day virtualization, running your own hardware can often be much cheaper and much more performant than AWS.
Re: Cloud server showdown: Amazon AWS EC2 vs. Linode vs. DigitalOcean
#114One of downsides of AWS is the bandwidth cost. It's 5x to 10x more expensive. Running heavy media based websites is just not feasible.
This is one of the things which annoys me about AWS, and certain other providers which do a per GB cost on outgoing bandwidth.
We get around 50TB of data transfer per month from Linode, from having around $500/month worth of servers. The cost of using this much data with EC2 - around $5400 a month. It's not even close to being competitive.
I'm surprised this isn't mentioned more often.
Re: Cloud server showdown: Amazon AWS EC2 vs. Linode vs. DigitalOcean
#115My two cents here: Benchmarking is all fine, but from my point of view, the performance-price-ratio is not sooooo important in hosting.
This discussion here reminds me of PC customers buying behavior in the 90ies. What's better AMD or Intel? ... Nowadays other features are key: What's the weight of this device? How thick is it even? Apple has changed the way we look at these things today.
Convenience also matters in hosting a lot. How much time do i have to spend to have my app up and running? Do i really want to set up and maintain everything myself? How good is the support? Do i want just bare metal computing resources or a solution provider with an eco system?
What matters the fastest server ever, when the queries are slow? The performance of any app/website relies heavily on the engineering skills of the developers. See caching, see i/o load, see frontend technolgies, see #perfmatters.
disclaimer: i am co-founder of a PHP PaaS.
Re: Cloud server showdown: Amazon AWS EC2 vs. Linode vs. DigitalOcean
#116The 'small' instance he's testing is the worst deal Amazon offers. If you buy certain instances you get can a better connection to EBS, and then you can allegedly buy better I/O for $. A fair analysis is going to involve pages and pages of graphs and charts... It is hard to beat AMZN's flexibility and easy provisioning. For instance, even my sister-in-law can walk up to AWS, spin up an instance with Windows, log in w…
good thing I wasn't the only person who immediately noticed from the spec of `why would you benchmark using m1-small?`
It feel likes the author doesn't know that EBS is network storage and not local storage and therefore depends heavily on the size of the instance for performance (unless you buy Provisioned IOPS).