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Easy Amazon EC2 Instance Comparison

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Re: Easy Amazon EC2 Instance Comparison

#41
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reserved instances are most likely for people not like us. You should be modeling your apps to take advantage of spot pricing not reserved.

Is there a reason you specifically want spot pricing over reserved? Do you save more money?

Yes, spot instances are significantly cheaper than even reserved instances. For example, a 3-year heavy utilization cc2.8xlarge instance costs $0.49/hr (with $10K up-front!), whereas its costs only $0.27/hr on the spot market (with nothing up-front). Your spot instance could run happily for several days or it could get killed 5 minutes later if there's a price spike. You have to accept uncertainty in exchange for the cheaper price.

Combining reserved instances with spot instances in the same pool can be a good strategy because you get cost-savings while also maintaining a minimum capacity. You can also spread spot instances over different availability zones, since spot price varies across zones.

FYI, I created an app that charts spot prices over time across various instance types, regions, and availability zones:

http://ec2price.com/

Re: Easy Amazon EC2 Instance Comparison

#42
post #6

I still don’t understand this industry’s obsession with predefined fixed limits on unrelated resources. Just because I want lots of RAM, why do I necessarily need lots of disk and/or lots of transfer? Or vice versa, why do I need to pay for lots of tranfer and RAM to get lots of disk? I get that AWS has separate billing for data, but they still tie CPU, RAM and Disk space together, as do most “traditional” VPS hosts.…

AWS has a bunch of options for exactly what you're looking for.

Just want better disk performance? Use instance storage or high provisioned IOPS EBS.

Just want a lot of memory? Pick a M2 or CR1 Memory-optimized instance type and pay for more RAM without adding CPU.

Just want more CPU power? Stick with the same amount of RAM as the m1.large but add 5 times the CPU power with the c1.xlarge.

More disk space? On EBS you just pay per GB.

Re: Easy Amazon EC2 Instance Comparison

#44
post #26
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just having checked out the companies you mentioned, they are cheaper for small-midsize hosting solutions. For running large memory and bandwidth hungry servers they just can't deliver. On Amazon you can get 256GB of ram with dedicated 10GBps clustered networking. None of the options you listed can go above 1GBps and it won't be dedicated (you'll get a 1GBps port onto a shared network, and you'll be at the mercy of t…

This one allows up to 384GB RAM: http://www.hetzner.de/hosting/produkte_rootserver/dx290 And it costs a fraction of EC2, which would cost you $2556 for 30.44 days. I could get 10 servers with 1 Gbit each, and it will still be cheaper than EC2.

Ok, that's interesting. It's non-obvious that it was possible from their site. But the network is still a major problem. 10 servers @ 1gbit are not equal to 1 @ 10gbit depennding on your use case. In my case the database is network limited, and it's extremely not-nice to have to partition it horizontally.

Re: Easy Amazon EC2 Instance Comparison

#45
post #6

I still don’t understand this industry’s obsession with predefined fixed limits on unrelated resources. Just because I want lots of RAM, why do I necessarily need lots of disk and/or lots of transfer? Or vice versa, why do I need to pay for lots of tranfer and RAM to get lots of disk? I get that AWS has separate billing for data, but they still tie CPU, RAM and Disk space together, as do most “traditional” VPS hosts.…

AWS has a bunch of options for exactly what you're looking for. Just want better disk performance? Use instance storage or high provisioned IOPS EBS. Just want a lot of memory? Pick a M2 or CR1 Memory-optimized instance type and pay for more RAM without adding CPU. Just want more CPU power? Stick with the same amount of RAM as the m1.large but add 5 times the CPU power with the c1.xlarge. More disk space? On EBS you…

That your examples are so different proves my point.

This is all ridiculously over-complicated, and no doubt over priced like everything AWS offers.

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