I agree that performances are bad on EC2. That's because of the overhead of virtualization.
It's not a "Big Scam" though, it's just bad performances. It still has lots of pros, instant deployment to name only one.
It's not a "Big Scam" though, it's just bad performances. It still has lots of pros, instant deployment to name only one.
The price I got at Joe's is not even "that" cheap. You can get a MUCH faster box at Softlayer for not much more, making EC2 look even more pathetic.
Performance/price wise, I think EC2 is definitely a scam. The flexibility aspect of it is what makes the comparison more difficult.
It all depends on what you are doing do; you want Amazon (or any cloud service) to scale automatically and auto failover for sites which grow (and shrink) massively over time.
I have no clue (at all) why people would run sites on Amazon which just use 1-2 servers and cannot scale automatically (and do not need to). In that case Softlayer or Iweb or something would be much better. Especially as they, these days, also have some 'hybrid' cloud experience where you can, not exactly at the speed/ease of Amazon, add dedicated or virtualized instances.
I agree that EC2 isn't value for money if you're looking to rent a server for a month at a time.
I think EC2 is definitely a scam