Cheapest plan: $200/month. That seems a bit high... what competes with this?
- fork of databases (looks great to try out migrations easily)
- read-only asynchronous replicas
- connection from EC2 or elsewhere
- health checks and "continuous protection"
Looks fairly solid at first sight.
what competes with this?
Since xeround is pay-as-you go, if your initial DB requirements are low, you can run it on something like http://fluxflex.com (which heroku-like PaaS, also AWS-based) and have 10 db-backed apps for something like $3 per month that will scale up when needed.
I believe Heroku used EC2 under the hood before the Salesforce acquisition.
Whether postgres (vs MySQL), the polish and better ui/workflow of heroku is worth the premium over RDS depends on you.
I'm not sure if these postgres servers are. However one interesting note is that the "maximum database size" of the heroku server is 2TB, while RDS is 1TB.
I'd be curious to know how reliable it is in practice, compared to a home-grown EC2 setup.
Of course, the real competition is other data-storage services like Amazon RDS, MongoHQ, MongoLab, etc. (all much cheaper)
(OK, so I excluded EBS costs from my EC2 comparison above but at $0.10/GB-month it's still going to be a huge difference for most cases)
It's more like 162 bucks a month for a comparable reserved EC2 instance. And 208 a month for a comparable reserved RDS instance. And that's of course with a 12 month commitment.
You can't really compare EC2 to an offering like this because you're paying for the amount of time / labor costs it frees up. And of course RDS doesn't support Postgres so there's not a lot of competition at the moment.
$200 per month for a database server is ridiculously cheap for a large company.