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

Amazon EC2 Instance Comparison

ec2instances.info

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 98 posts

Re: Amazon EC2 Instance Comparison

#31

Post by moonboots »

taligent wrote: post #29
moonboots wrote: post #16

There has been a lot of discussion on HN about dedicated hosting at Hetzner vs Amazon, and while they offer different pros and cons, Amazon appears to be a lot more expensive for comparable or even worse specs. Here's a comparison of two servers that have roughly comparable specs, Amazon High-Memory Double Extra Large and Hetzner ex8s: cpu: hetzner: Intel Xeon E3-1275 (4 physical cores) ec2: 4 virtual cores (13 "ecus…

I thought it was well known that Amazon is very expensive compared to ANY dedicated hosting provider. But that's not the point of AWS. The point is that you get a PLATFORM as a service. Not just a box. You get an enterprise class queuing, workflow, load balancing, DNS etc all in the one place. Not to mention it's unrivalled auto scaling features.

I think most people realize aws charges a premium for the ability to scale up and down, but at least for me, the magnitude of the price difference was nevertheless surprising. Some of the services Amazon offers will certainly be worth the premium for a subset of customers. However, the price difference makes other features like auto scaling moot because you can overprovision servers at Hetzner and still have a much lower price.

Re: Amazon EC2 Instance Comparison

#32

Post by flyt »

jeffbarr wrote: post #5

Here's a suggestion for a big improvement: Pick apart the EC2 pricing page ( http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/ ) and find the URLs to the JSON (e.g. http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/ri-light-linux.json ) and build something that's totally dynamic. Although the URLs and the formats aren't an official AWS API, I think it is pretty safe to count on them for an application like this.

Dear person that works at Amazon Web Services: please just build this for the community. ec2instances.info is a much better resource than the existing pricing page and the calculator is entirely too much for many uses/discussions.

thanks.

edit: or copy this: http://mikekhristo.com/ec2-ondemand-vs-reserved-instance-sav...

Re: Amazon EC2 Instance Comparison

#33

Post by rehack »

moonboots wrote: post #16

There has been a lot of discussion on HN about dedicated hosting at Hetzner vs Amazon, and while they offer different pros and cons, Amazon appears to be a lot more expensive for comparable or even worse specs. Here's a comparison of two servers that have roughly comparable specs, Amazon High-Memory Double Extra Large and Hetzner ex8s: cpu: hetzner: Intel Xeon E3-1275 (4 physical cores) ec2: 4 virtual cores (13 "ecus…

Looking at it this way, the price difference does look staggering. And I am happy that Hetzner kind of dedicated hosting services will keep EC2 kind of cloud hosting services honest.

We moved from a dedicated service to EC2 in 2010. At the time got some 30/40% drop in the hosting cost for the same traffic. As apart from marginally less hosting price, it also allowed us to start some instances in the day time and shut them in the night. So hourly billing is a plus.

Which also allows me to not shy away from experimenting before use. For example, on moving time we were on 32 bit and were running only small instances.

Now we have built 64 bit images which allows running of anything we like from small to extra-large. So for example at present we have 2 mediums and 1 small running in the day time. And just 1 medium and 1 small running in the night time.

And for some time in between tried it out with just 1 large and 1 small. I always need a small one. As there are lots of scripts which keep doing health checks etc. on each other, and can restart the other, on some conditions. So 2 instances are needed for reasons.

So you have to factor in these kind of reasons too. The dynamism it offers is a big reason (and need for some) to stay there when the other alternative is dedicated.

Sincere question: As I would like to be aware of some other good options. Does some other companies like RackSpace offer as much control as EC2 does?

edit: typos and minor rephrase

Re: Amazon EC2 Instance Comparison

#34

Post by moonboots »

corin_ wrote: post #30
moonboots wrote: post #16

There has been a lot of discussion on HN about dedicated hosting at Hetzner vs Amazon, and while they offer different pros and cons, Amazon appears to be a lot more expensive for comparable or even worse specs. Here's a comparison of two servers that have roughly comparable specs, Amazon High-Memory Double Extra Large and Hetzner ex8s: cpu: hetzner: Intel Xeon E3-1275 (4 physical cores) ec2: 4 virtual cores (13 "ecus…

Slight typo in network - 7euro/TB not 7TB/euro (technically it's €6.90, and you can actually pay €0/TB if you are happy going from 100 to 10 Mbit.

thanks

Re: Amazon EC2 Instance Comparison

#35

Post by ww520 »

moonboots wrote: post #16

There has been a lot of discussion on HN about dedicated hosting at Hetzner vs Amazon, and while they offer different pros and cons, Amazon appears to be a lot more expensive for comparable or even worse specs. Here's a comparison of two servers that have roughly comparable specs, Amazon High-Memory Double Extra Large and Hetzner ex8s: cpu: hetzner: Intel Xeon E3-1275 (4 physical cores) ec2: 4 virtual cores (13 "ecus…

That's the EC2 on-demand price. Getting a dedicated box means going long term; comparing to EC2's reserved pricing is more compatible in need.

Here are the EC2 rates for reserved instance (total including hourly fee plus reservation fee):

$375/month for reserving 1 year

$282/month for reserving 3 years

It's not too bad compared to Hetzner. On-demand instance is for spinning it up on very short notice and shutting it down after the work is done.

Re: Amazon EC2 Instance Comparison

#36

Post by moonboots »

ww520 wrote: post #35
moonboots wrote: post #16

There has been a lot of discussion on HN about dedicated hosting at Hetzner vs Amazon, and while they offer different pros and cons, Amazon appears to be a lot more expensive for comparable or even worse specs. Here's a comparison of two servers that have roughly comparable specs, Amazon High-Memory Double Extra Large and Hetzner ex8s: cpu: hetzner: Intel Xeon E3-1275 (4 physical cores) ec2: 4 virtual cores (13 "ecus…

That's the EC2 on-demand price. Getting a dedicated box means going long term; comparing to EC2's reserved pricing is more compatible in need. Here are the EC2 rates for reserved instance (total including hourly fee plus reservation fee): $375/month for reserving 1 year $282/month for reserving 3 years It's not too bad compared to Hetzner. On-demand instance is for spinning it up on very short notice and shutting it…

Reserved instance pricing brings the monthly price down, but for me it's not making ec2 look more appealing. The 3 year price is still 2.5 times the hetzner monthly price after initial setup fees, you lose the ability to autoscale this box, and you are locked-in for 3 years. I would argue a Hetzner box is more like ec2 on demand than reserved because it can be canceled at the end of any month. You can't spin it down immediately and stop paying, but you are definitely not locked in.

Re: Amazon EC2 Instance Comparison

#37

Post by jakejake »

I made a similar spreadsheet when I was trying to compare Amazon RDS with a dedicated server from Rackspace. It's a little tricky due to different services having different pricing methods - some of which based on the amount of bandwidth you use. But, this is my attempt to neutralize the differences to compare prices.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Avu9TF0Jdh2adHA...

Re: Amazon EC2 Instance Comparison

#39

Post by janzer »

moonboots wrote: post #31
taligent wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought it was well known that Amazon is very expensive compared to ANY dedicated hosting provider. But that's not the point of AWS. The point is that you get a PLATFORM as a service. Not just a box. You get an enterprise class queuing, workflow, load balancing, DNS etc all in the one place. Not to mention it's unrivalled auto scaling features.

I think most people realize aws charges a premium for the ability to scale up and down, but at least for me, the magnitude of the price difference was nevertheless surprising. Some of the services Amazon offers will certainly be worth the premium for a subset of customers. However, the price difference makes other features like auto scaling moot because you can overprovision servers at Hetzner and still have a much l…

Anyone that is running servers for a large percentage of the time should be using reserved instances that are priced much lower than the on demand prices shown here. For example for a small instance that runs constantly, using a heavy utilization reserved instance would cost $335.16 for a year compared to $700.80 with on demand pricing.

Re: Amazon EC2 Instance Comparison

#40

Post by rehack »

moonboots wrote: post #36
ww520 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the EC2 on-demand price. Getting a dedicated box means going long term; comparing to EC2's reserved pricing is more compatible in need. Here are the EC2 rates for reserved instance (total including hourly fee plus reservation fee): $375/month for reserving 1 year $282/month for reserving 3 years It's not too bad compared to Hetzner. On-demand instance is for spinning it up on very short notice and shutting it…

Reserved instance pricing brings the monthly price down, but for me it's not making ec2 look more appealing. The 3 year price is still 2.5 times the hetzner monthly price after initial setup fees, you lose the ability to autoscale this box, and you are locked-in for 3 years. I would argue a Hetzner box is more like ec2 on demand than reserved because it can be canceled at the end of any month. You can't spin it down…

> I would argue a Hetzner box is more like ec2 on demand than reserved because it can be canceled at the end of any month.

Don't agree with this, unless there is hourly billing. As if you just want to try out some thing, say a large instance instead of medium, to just see how it changes something, won't be possible here.

edit: would love to know why the down vote?

Post reply on HN