Using AWS's simple calculator[0] for S3, I get a figure of $97.82 for 250GB storage and 1TB data transfer out per month. DO's price is $5. I know AWS is considered more expensive but that's a huge difference - is my calculation wrong here?
But I guess if you factor in not losing customers due to obscure IE problems on AWS, we could have saved over 100% ;) by not losing customers.
Some businesses don't need to worry about obscure IE problems, and AWS will make sense, for us it didn't.
The biggest reason Linode didn't make sense for us is that we couldn't scale hard drive space without scaling everything else, too. As the site grew this became pretty crazy.
I've managed to find a good Xen based vps/dedi host that let you customise memory/disk independently (but regular vps are all "just" 2 vcpus I believe).
You can still run your own CDN on linode & use amazon s3 as an origin server.
How does this industry manage to fuck up usage of very specific technical terms so often.
Bandwidth is the speed. The hint is in the name. Wider means more at once.
You're almost certainly talking about the amount of data transfered.
The most depressing part is seeing hosting companies use the same incorrect terminology.
If I were comparing cost of bursting, the semantics would be worth arguing.
Market rate is actually below $0.01/GB even, but I'm very comfortable paying that rate for a multi-homed connection to a managed service.
Not to say they don't also charge that for bandwidth in those locations, but per-GB pricing in Australia is more like 20-50c/GB
That's almost always a nice problem to have. If it was profitable in small scale usage, then it's usually profitable in widespread usage once economies of scale have been applied.