Very nice. A direct competitor to the entry level DigitalOcean 512MB servers which cost $5 a month. The great thing is that as your grow, you won't outgrow AWS, which is not necessary true with DO.
You can't even log into the instance at all for that price. You also have to pay for bandwidth (very expensive) and EBS (not bad, unless you want it to be as fast as DO's local SSD).
Setting aside that the DO droplets are far more bang for the buck in terms of consistent CPU usage, and also (to be fair) that AWS offers far more scalability options, bandwidth alone is shockingly expensive at AWS.
At 9 cents per GB, you'd be looking at $90/mo for bandwidth alone for what DO gives you included in the $5/mo.
The $80/mo Digital Ocean server w/ 5TB of transfer would cost $450 at EC2 JUST IN BANDWIDTH ALONE!!
And, at DO, if you exceed that bandwidth allocation that's included for free, it's $20/TB vs $90/TB at EC2 (both charge outgoing only).
These are costs that most people don't consider but really amount to poorly explained fine print costs. (Others include Glacier restore pricing, intra-region bandwidth, etc.)
(disclaimer: I'm an AWS certified SA and my SSH key manager startup, Userify[1], is an AWS partner, but even so we are still forced to use DO for a large part of our infrastructure -- especially where bandwidth is concerned.)
1. https://userify.com (cloud ssh key management)
What? could you please explain how would you manage the instance if you can't log in to it?
Worry about the disk, worry about things that use gigabytes of bandwidth. But don't worry about it costing extra to log in.
For $60/mo you can get 4Tb space free, basically unlimited bandwidth and a permanent 4XL-equivalent instance that makes scaling up to that point extremely easy with no need to configure autoscaling, s3, inter-service communication, cloud formations or complicated fail-over strategies. Unlike AWS instances that die frequently, a dedicated server is much less likely to malfunction.
Latency was an absolute disaster even typing characters via SSH was horribly slow.
The management platform was hilariously bad (they where still sending me notification emails about 9mths after I cancelled).
We went back to linode for everything after that, for our needs it hits the sweet spot between cost and reliability (back then DO was new and had it's own issues, largely due to a flaky network).
Now I'd possibly consider DO for compute or job servers but I think I'd still use Linode for anything that wasn't running on my own hardware, I've been a customer with them for something like 6 years and they've never let me down.
I've used Hetzner for 2 years now for a lot for personal projects, and I do get slowish SSH sometimes, but that's what Mosh is for. Also, it's much better for European customers than for US ones.
They are also the only service I can afford for personal projects that requires a lot of RAM. Basically, any machine learning with a ton of features.
Here's a test with latency:
URL tested: http://rerecommender.com
Test performed from: New York, NY
Test performed at: 2015-12-18 04:36:44 (GMT +00:00)
Resolved As: 188.40.128.87
Status: OK
Response Time: 0.306 sec
DNS: 0.075 sec
Connect: 0.115 sec
Redirect: 0.000 sec
First byte: 0.116 sec
Last byte: 0.001 sec
Size: 7688 bytesSo some Chinese residents buy the servers to spam others and then they have to clear blacklists for their server IPs?
We're racing against time and 4,000% growth... Userify[1] is also offering an enterprise[2] version for customers that require it for compliance reasons.. and working on some really helpful upcoming features.
2. enterprise[at]userify
It might be ok if I really really need it like right now but if I'm just 'oh looks cool, might be useful' and have no clue how expensive it might get (and not motivated enough to sign up and find it out then) then it's not great.
The ability to arrange user by projects, and then roles in projects has been awesome. You could have devs who have full access to development servers for project #1, limited access to staging, and no access to production, while having totally different levels of access on a different project, etc. You don't have to organize that way, but you basically get an org structure of a top level group that contains any number of child level groups (so, two levels of organization).
The total number of options are limited, I would say Userify is focusing on doing their one thing (or few things) really well.
Paired with Puppet scripts, AWS, Deploy Bot, and Laravel Forge, I'm able to deploy PHP, Java, Python, and Node.js apps to all kinds of funky server configs and access management is not even thought about any more. Just put the right keys in the provisioning scripts and the server gets the correct SSH user list and user keys.
Also, being able to centrally revoke privileges is also very awesome as contractors come into and out of projects.
The parent was correct that a pricing page was missing; fixed! https://userify.com/
If every VPS on Digital Ocean and Linode actually used their quota, they wouldn't have uplink capacity to support it and the network would fail. That's overselling. Numbers that high are extensive overselling. Linode has 40 Gbit links (at least they used to), and give 2 TB (6 Mbps) to each small Linode, meaning about 7,000 Linodes actually using the quota would saturate the link. They have a few more than that. Do the math.
The bandwidth quotas are sales stuff so that you will say exactly this in threads like these, and it's amazing how well it works.
That comes to $22,700 for a year of service if you don't exceed 1 gigabit/s at the 95th percentile.
In Amazon's bandwidth terms, that's 331 terabytes transferred, or $17,000 per month if all of that bandwidth is outbound. You would have to limit your average transfer to 110mbit/s in order to achieve cost parity.
So yes, bandwidth is incredibly expensive in AWS and you can easily do better in datacenter-land (or with cloud providers who bill differently), provided that you are operating at sufficient scale.
Where "sufficient scale" probably means you're spending 100k+ a year on infrastructure. Let alone staff costs to support it. Also in your example you have no datacenter redundancy so it's 44k if you want to be in 2 DCs, which means "sufficient scale" is probably more like 200k+.
"if you don't exceed 1 gigabit/s at the 95th percentile"
That's a big if, the internet, startups and business in general are uncertain and it's often very difficult to know what your 95th percentile will look like in the future.
Also, it's unlikely that your network utilization is constant. A utilization rate of 50% would be ambitious.
So a better comparison is 44k for 1gig in 2 datacenters vs 102k for AWS (17/2*12), assuming you can predict your network utilization pretty well.
Nothing says you have to do it all on your own. Let the DC operator do the heavy lifting, all you have to do is rent a dedicated server, VPS or colocate. Total spend to sufficient scale: a few dollars - a few grand per month.
> That's a big if, the internet, startups and business in > general are uncertain and it's often very difficult to > know what your 95th percentile will look like in the > future.
It's really not that hard. Look at historical usage and assume it continues as before. If you are worried have a spare dedicated server or two with 1G/10G interfaces.
> Also, it's unlikely that your network utilization is > constant. A utilization rate of 50% would be ambitious.
This really is a moot point as you effectively only pay for peak usage with 95th percentile billing. Alternatively you can pay per terabyte of traffic, which is effectively average usage. Average usage also correlates strongly with peak usage, so in the end it's all the same, give or take a constant.
> So a better comparison is 44k for 1gig in 2 datacenters > vs 102k for AWS (17/2*12), assuming you can predict your > network utilization pretty well.
Nope. A proper comparison is about $1000 per month for two dedicated servers in two DCs versus $102k per year for AWS.
What is ironic about your statement is that t2 CPU allocations are massively oversubscribed in the same way. (but far more aggressively!)
And yes, AWS's CPU over subscription on these instances is important if your workload is CPU intensive. They're very quickly outgrown due to that but useful in a pinch.
I don't agree; as long as you can always use it when you needed, you are getting what you paid for - that's actual. What you're talking about is the value in an hypothetical situation. Now, if you are actually impacted by the oversubscription, then the actual value is below what was promised, but that doesn't seem to be the case for jamiesonbecker's use of DO.
Explain why despite wholesale internet prices collapsing, AWS continues to charge the same with virtually no yoy decline? Azure et al also do this fwiw. It's just gouging.
Even internal clouds, people migrate their data centres to VMware, xen, kvm etc... because most servers only use a fraction of CPU and network allocated to them.
When you do need full cpu or bandwidth, you know it and you build for it.
My AWS skills (VPC architecture, Direct Connect, boto, etc.) have been a big hiring plus for me in the past. Since nobody relevant uses Linode for production any more due to security and other issues, probably time to move personal blogs and accrue transferable skills.
People also compare the big holy wow bandwidth/SSD/CPU offered by DO and Linode without accounting for the fact that you could almost never use it all at the price point without hitting (a) capacities of the instance and (b) annoyed employees. Jeff's data on how successful their CPU quota accounting is backs this up. If you're pegging a core in your workload you should probably own the core.
Seriously, think about it. DO offers you a terabyte on the low end plan. You have to sustain 3 megabit/sec every second of every day to hit that. Maybe in some scenarios you are, but almost nobody running personal gear is doing that. The higher levels are even more ridiculous. But the sales stuff works: people are concerned about it in this thread, merely the potential to use instead of paying for actual.
I'm not in the industry (I'm in higher education), but this is news to me.
Are there any use cases where Digital Ocean/Linode would be better than AWS? A small blog, website, perhaps?
Old school VPS providers can't compete due to resources. Amazon and Google have far more people working on perf, security, and so on. Sadly, VPS providers are going the way of shared hosting.
The nano doesn't tempt me to move any of the half dozen or so VPS's I have running to AWS in the slightest. I'll stick to vendors who answer support tickets from the little guys, oversell fairly, and don't have a ridiculously complex pricing structure.
And shared hosting isn't dead. Plenty of small businesses still pay good money for managed shared hosting to run their webpages etc, instead of paying a wannabe-sysadmin who probably doesn't even shell-in to the VPS once a month. My uncle runs a small business and pays his webmaster around $30/month for a website running off an IP that hosts at least 3,300 other domains...most of them small businesses just like his. Someone is making a mint on that box.
Are there any good introductions to cloud computing you could recommend?
To get the equivalent you'll need to read up on the basics of:
EC2, which provides you with the actual server.
EBS, their network attached storage which your server will boot from.
Elastic IPs, to give the server a stable public IP address you can point DNS at.
And Security Groups, which don't have a DO equivalent, but control network access to your server. They're arguably worth moving from DO for alone.
If you just want to test the waters then EC2's startup wizard will handle all this for you, and you don't really have to think much more about it than you would on DO. However, you've then got the ability to grow into the rest of AWS as you need it.
They were hacked, badly, and tried pretty hard to pass it off as "no big deal" for a while. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5552756 https://blog.linode.com/2013/04/16/security-incident-update/
I was wondering about technical limitations.
The problem with dropping a care-free VPS (what DO is for, and what you're comparing against) on AWS has always been transfer. Even my least used personal VPS eats 25-30GB/month in outbound. How much does that cost at AWS? Another $5? and then you're constantly worried about your usage month on month. I'd rather give $10-20/month to DO/Vultr/Linode to begin with and get more memory as a bonus.
I think this is cool don't get me wrong. Lots of uses for a cheap low use server. But this is pretty niche.
> The t2.nano offers the full performance of a high frequency Intel CPU core if your workload utilizes less than 5% of the core on average over 24 hours.
This means you get the full CPU if you have a bursty workload, and really is no different from what DO's policy is:
> We do not set a cap on CPU usage by default but we do monitor for droplets doing a consistent 100% CPU and may CPU limit droplets displaying this behavior.
In the EC2 case, the CPU throttling policy is just explicit.
[1] https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/cpu-usage-a...
I've never dealt with stricter CPU limits than AWS's. Most providers will not be happy if you peg an entire core to 100% (after all, the physical cores are oversold), but they usually don't mind if the percentage is even as big as 50%.
My point is this is an instance type thing, not a provider thing as you've extrapolated. They're experimenting with vast overselling on those instance types and it's not across the board.
On anything that isn't a t1/t2 instance, AWS doesn't care a bit if you're pegged at 100% all month long.
This doesn't include bandwidth and IO requests.
I might understand charging separately for bandwidth, but IO requests? I end up making between 75M to 95M IO requests, and it adds a good $8 or so to my bill. Plus, there's EBS which for 60GB (not SSD!) adds another $6.
So all in all, for ~$65 I'm getting a single core, 3.75GB RAM, 60GB storage, and am stuck with their old pricing for a year, whereas with DO for $40 I can get 2 cores, 4GB RAM, 60GB SSD and no "IO request" costs!
It's DO as soon as my 1-year is done.
For crazy dynamic workloads with moderate bandwidth usage, AWS makes good financial sense. Also, S3 and SQS are phenomenal. (As are DynamoDB, Redshift, Lambda, and Kinesis, but these can get expensive fast.)
AWS really has simply awesome technology, and they can afford to charge what they want for it, and I do believe they strike a pretty good balance most of the time. Also, the Free Tier is really very nice and fair. I'd just like to see the cost model get a bit more transparent and a bit lower in fees, especially on the low end.
I didn't know that. Thank you!
> Also, S3 and SQS are phenomenal
I agree. Which is why I'm going to continue using S3 for my daily backups but move to DO for compute.
For 28$/month you can get a similar instances as on amazon (1CPU and 3.75GB RAM) and 60GB SSD is another 10$. 60GB standard storage is 2.40$.
I'm impressed that Google Cloud is adding a couple of new features every month and I can see them a strong AWS competitor soon.
if you only need like 1 server though DO is great. Security and some things in bigger systems you get to roll your own (i.e. no storage, private IP aint really private, etc).