Unless you need AWS for the scaling it offers, it tends to be the worst possible host you could choose.
And even if you need the scaling, a mixed stack with dedis and EC2 on demand shouldn't be hard to run.
And even if you need the scaling, a mixed stack with dedis and EC2 on demand shouldn't be hard to run.
Unless, in turn, you use reserved instances, which bring the price down to equal or cheaper than most other options. "dedis and EC2 on demand" is an order of magnitude more complex, probably actually more expensive, and increases your failure cases significantly.
https://www.ovh.com/us/dedicated-servers/details-servers.xml... For 12 months will cost you about $800
A somewhat comparable EC2 instance (that still has way lower specs) m3.2xlarge will have an up-front cost of $1772, and an hourly cost of $0.146. So you'd be looking at a total yearly bill of $3051, which would pay for 3 of those dedis.
I honestly don't know how anyone could describe that as competitive.
> "dedis and EC2 on demand" is an order of magnitude more complex, probably actually more expensive.
If you're one of the few people that actually need the rapid scaling that EC2 can provide, sure. But that's an extremely specific and rare use case.
I'm also familiar with exactly how misleading a specs comparison ends up when you can architect an application to leverage burstable instances and rapid auto-scaling, letting you require little expenditure during slow periods while still responding gracefully to load. This isn't some deep-magic thing for sites with tens of thousands of instances, either--I've had clients with ten total instances benefit both financially and operationally from building out fairly straightforward elastic capacity (not least because the same code paths necessary for elasticity also makes things like setting up development environments single-click affairs, which enables deeper and more complete testing of the application to ensure correctness).
Even were a $2200 premium a credible number, that's eleven hours of my billing rate. Reimplementing what AWS provides even a fairly straightforward system--easy, API-driven system deployment and configuration (and while OVH's public cloud APIs can enable some of this, your "dedis" cannot), straightforward and API-controlled support services of more or less any stripe, integrated system monitoring and alerting--would be hundreds of hours of work, be a worse solution, and require ongoing maintenance. (A decent hosting provider will offer some of that, of course. But not all. And you'll pay for it.)
That's good to know. I was contemplating going with them for my next project. AWS it is then!
The only problem I see with AWS is the configuration overhead. Want storage? Well, we have a separate service for that! Now you have to understand the pricing, the API, etc. just to integrate it into your stack.
I completely understand how this modular approach helps with scaling, but when starting out it just feels like way too much overhead, especially for a single dev like me.
I do some advisory stuff for students and bootstrapping startups that are looking to work in cloud environments. Feel free to drop me an email (in my profile) if you'd like to chat.
There's a plenty of places that aren't OVH, however I figured they'd be the most relevant choice here as game servers were being discussed earlier. DDoS protection being cool and all, something you really don't get on EC2.
>This isn't some deep-magic thing for sites with tens of thousands of instances, either--I've had clients with ten total instances benefit both financially and operationally from building out fairly straightforward elastic capacity (not least because the same code paths necessary for elasticity also makes things like setting up development environments single-click affairs, which enables deeper and more complete testing of the application to ensure correctness).
If for the cost of 10 instances they could've had 30 dedicated servers with better specs, did they really benefit very much? While I can certainly appreciate the part about development environments, applications that would actually benefit from such scaling are rather rare. Although, admittedly, if they hired you they probably did need it.
>Even were a $2200 premium a credible number, that's eleven hours of my billing rate.
$2200 per instance, does someone only running a couple of boxes even need your services?
>Reimplementing what AWS provides even a fairly straightforward system--easy, API-driven system deployment and configuration (and while OVH's public cloud APIs can enable some of this, your "dedis" cannot), straightforward and API-controlled support services of more or less any stripe, integrated system monitoring and alerting--would be hundreds of hours of work, be a worse solution, and require ongoing maintenance.
And again, I believe most businesses simply don't need what AWS providers. AWS is certainly a good choice if you actually need what they offer, however very few do.
The reinsurance company I used to work for could be run on about 5 aws servers compute wise... they do about $3 trillion in in force life insurance policies a year.
Also, once you're paying upfront for reserved instances you've lost one of the major advantages in your cashflow scaling with your usage.