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Comment by ajju | Hacker News Reader

Seriously, the lack of a flat fee model is the main thing that has kept me away from AWS.

That's the point, though: usage driven fees. It's absolutely not the most economical offering, but the freedom and ability to either quadruple your infrastructure or shut it down entirely, no strings attached, in an instant is what you're paying for.

With most of dedicated server providers now, you can get any server with a 1 month contract, no strings attached, for a fraction of the price of an equivalent ec2 instance, and good IO as a bonus. And good providers usually delivers within 24h.

I love aws services and use them myself, but for ec2, but I doubt most users have such volatile needs. The main advantage I see, for aws users (non ec2) is to have everything in the same place.

I would love it if you could provide a link to your cheaper for more service providers. I've not found anything comparable for less $. Also, if you're comparing lock-in prices, compare them against the EC2 reserved instance prices.

How about http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver-pr...

and

http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver-pr...

been with them for 3+ years and never had a problem

They look great. Too bad they're in Germany :(

serverbeach has dual quad-core servers with 6-48 gigs of RAM for relatively reasonable prices, month to month.

I used to use serverbeach. They are definitely not cheaper if you compare RAM to RAM (just under 2x the cost of EC2 reserved), but of course they're dedicated not VPS, which is a better offering... not sure how much more their cheapest dedicated boxes are worth in comparison to an ec2 small instance though.

http://www.gandi.net/hosting

Interesting pricing breakdown (reminds me of Heroku), however they seem to be more expensive than Linode and definitely more than EC2.

They're cheaper than both for bandwidth which is what I care about most.

Yeah another shout for hetzner http://www.hetzner.de/en/, their eq line is pretty good value for money http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver-pr...

How about research uses? That kind of computing power is almost entirely un-buyable at the short terms many research needs have. You buy a month, or you buy nothing. EC2: you buy a minute, if that's all you need.

> With most of dedicated server providers now, you can get any server with a 1 month contract

Still not really the point. You're going to have to buy enough servers in advance to handle your peak load every month. And then you're going to have to forecast ahead at the end of the month and cancel all the ones you don't need. It might be theoretically possible but in practice it is ridiculous. EC2 brings the contract interval to 1 hour and lets you control it with API calls.

http://newservers.com/ does hourly-billed, API provisioned, dedicated servers.

Many companies will resell space to you on AWS with a flat fee model. Many hosts now are simply AWS front-ends.

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