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Comment by msravi | Hacker News Reader

I'm actually contemplating moving out of AWS to DO. I signed up for a 1-year m3.medium reserved instance with AWS (Singapore region) sometime in May when the reserved instance cost was ~$50/month (it's now $35/month but I'm stuck with their old rate).

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.

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EBS w/ SSD doesn't have I/O request fees attached. DO is still a better deal overall.

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.

> EBS w/ SSD doesn't have I/O request fees attached

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.

Did you check out Google Cloud ? I moved all my company's instances to them and I ended up cheaper than on Vultr (similar pricing with DO), while also benefiting to more features (storage, mysql, etc) and better uptime.

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.

Google Cloud had a very impressive year. It has lots of killer features that AWS lacks. * Cloud Shell: Sweetest thing that happened since I started using cloud, no need to install dev tools * SSH right from web console * No need of managing ssh keys: Google takes care of it. If a user is removed, the users ssh keys are automatically revoked. * Security by default: Encryption at rest and on wire for all the products (Storage, Disks, SQL .. ) * Datalab (in alpha): Do data science from the browser (Jupyter as a service). * Pub/Sub + Dataflow: This is how I envision next generation Kafka + Samza to look like. * Container Engine, consistent performance, blazing fast disks and more.

I recently went DO to GCE when my app graduated to big boy status, and have been happy. Maybe grass is greener ;)

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).

IO requests on ebs-backed volumes go across the network, so I guess they are charging for internal bandwidth in some sense.

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