Show HN: Amazon EC2 instance comparison table | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Amazon EC2 instance comparison table

ec2instances.info

122 pointspowdahound33 comments

Made this a while back because I was sick of the way Amazon's instance info (http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/) and pricing info (http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/) were on different pages in a hard-to-browse format.

Hoping this helps people compare and choose new instances following yesterday's troubles.

Simple, but highly functional. That's the right way to do it.

Any chance we could get some other regions in there too?

You bet - I'm hoping to add more regions and data once I have some free time. Still putting out some EC2 fires from yesterday.

If you want ec2instances.info without the www to work you might consider using WWWizer (http://www.wwwizer.com/)

Basically you can point any domain's A record to 174.129.25.170 and it will redirect you to the www subdomain.

That's a great idea. Just hooked it up.

Or you use a .htacess and do not give a random person control over your domain.

  Options +FollowSymlinks
  RewriteEngine on
  rewritecond %{http_host} ^ec2instances.info [nc]
  rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.ec2instances.info/$1 [r=301,nc]

The site is hosted on S3 so that type of configuration isn't an option. More details: http://powdahound.com/2011/03/hosting-a-static-site-on-amazo...

If you registered it with GoDaddy, you can use their free domain parking service.

This is very helpful, thanks. I also hate Amazon's tables.

You should put up a donation link.

I've personally found running 3-4 micro instances behind a load balancer offers more RAM, more CPU power (in short bursts), and fail over than 1 Small instance at the same price or cheaper. However, it doesn't always make sense for every application.

For all those asking about reserved-instance data, I posted this a few months back. Somewhat surprisingly, I didn't get any interest back then.

http://blog.altudov.com/2010/11/03/amazon-ec2-reserved-insta...

https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0Ah1sNhjIaHmVdFQzSk5...

Thank you. This is way better than the way amazon lays it out. Can you add the additional zones (asia, europe). Simple but very useful. Thanks

Agreed, the current overview sucks. Amazon should hire the guy :)

Yes because knowing how to use HTML tables and 1 jQuery plugin means you're ready to work at a Fortune 500 company.

A fortune 500 company has all kinds of jobs. Not everyone needs to be uberl33t like you.

Did you create an account just to reply to my nonsense post?

Yeah but the 3 click process of using my Google account to log in wasn't really a hassle. With Reddit being down and all I guess it was time for me to create an account here.

Nice overview, and I wholeheartedly concur that the AWS site is a mess.

Gladly the actual AWS Web GUI works pretty well, and so does their pricing calculator[1]. But everything else could really use a design overhaul.

[1] http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/calc5.html

Please add reserved instances and EBS volumes!

Awesome job powdahound, and I support this comment. You could show the cost units for reserved instances as a range.

For example a small reserved instance's base cost is $227.50 per year so that's a lower bound of $.0263/hour. Then adding $.03 per hour used the upper bound is $.0563/hour.

So over the course of a year you'd pay within the range $.0263/hour - $.0563/hour depending on your usage.

Pretty cool! Is there a way to show the spot instances price too? Maybe some ajax magic?

Reserved instances would be nice, too.

Totally agree. Would love to add all this data once I have some free time. Some basic performance data could be cool too...

Great work! Could you please add the Ec2 Suse instance types to the table, for comparison? I haven't been able to compare the Cpu performance of the Suse instance type compared to the standard types.

Added to my todo list. Didn't even realize there were special SUSE types. :)

Suse and non-Suse instances run on the same hardware at different prices.

The raw CPU performance of the SUSE and regular Linux instances is identical. The difference is purely the Operating System. On the SUSE instances, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is preinstalled and all updates are automatically available. You do not need a separate subscription from Novell. With the base instances you need to provide your own OS license/subscription as applicable.

(Disclaimer: I'm responsible for the AMIs for SUSE)

Looks good. A nice-to have addition would be price per compute unit.

Price per Gb memory would be good also.

Would be nice to have a 'monthly' price for each instance, calculated for 720 hours, for easily comparing to other services.

Can I ask what did you use to make those tables please?

I'm a beginner CSS/HTML person, so any help would be greatly appreciated.

I just used a jQuery plugin called tablesorter: http://tablesorter.com/docs/

Wow, a site using the .info domain showing info.

Will a site using .biz for honest business be next?

can you also add other regions?

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