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Comment by taligent | Hacker News Reader

I thought it was well known that Amazon is very expensive compared to ANY dedicated hosting provider.

But that's not the point of AWS. The point is that you get a PLATFORM as a service. Not just a box. You get an enterprise class queuing, workflow, load balancing, DNS etc all in the one place. Not to mention it's unrivalled auto scaling features.

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These are not magic features. You still have to make your app scale. And once you did it, it works as well on dedicated servers.

Dedicated servers come with dedicated disks or SSDs, memory, CPUs, network cards.

Decent dedicated hosting providers deliver new servers in a few hours. And they too provide load balancing, dns, filers, backups, elastic ips, etc.

The only difference between AWS or a decent dedicated servers provider is the time it takes to put a new servers online. Minutes with AWS, hours with dedicated servers.

Considering that AWS prices can easily be twice the price of dedicated servers, renting a few spare dedicated servers is still cheaper than AWS, and delays are even shorter.

Dedicated providers don't provide SQS, SWF, S3, SimpleDB, RDS, DynamoDB, EMR, Search. Which for me anyway are essential as they are enterprise class, very cheap, managed, scalable solutions.

The best combination is a dedicated server for the app server that is close to Amazon.

If Bezos loosened up control, there could be an EXCELLENT secondary market of colocation space directly connected to AWS in all zones. The Mall next to the Mall, still makes the Mall the main attraction. Give me 10GE, infiniband, etc out the back door of an AWS data center and I will give u the world!

They have that already:

http://aws.amazon.com/directconnect/

OMG. Seriously. I am going to go make a pitch for VC money. Thankyou.

If you're serious and would like to talk about the ways third-parties can leverage DirectConnect let me know, contact info in profile.

For a great example see http://www.zadarastorage.com/.

Thanks. How often are you in Seattle?

I think most people realize aws charges a premium for the ability to scale up and down, but at least for me, the magnitude of the price difference was nevertheless surprising. Some of the services Amazon offers will certainly be worth the premium for a subset of customers. However, the price difference makes other features like auto scaling moot because you can overprovision servers at Hetzner and still have a much lower price.

Anyone that is running servers for a large percentage of the time should be using reserved instances that are priced much lower than the on demand prices shown here. For example for a small instance that runs constantly, using a heavy utilization reserved instance would cost $335.16 for a year compared to $700.80 with on demand pricing.

I know what you mean. I only realised AFTER I had put in the all the effort to deploy my apps.

Actually one of the best ways to go is to find dedicated hosting providers in the same data center. For example Server Beach is faster at accessing Amazon SQS than Amazon EC2 is.

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