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Comment by patrickgzill | Hacker News Reader

This is an excellent cautionary article... I still don't get all the love for AWS after they have shown that they have less uptime than many dedicated server providers.

Reliability is the greatest feature you can offer, as a downed service can't be used by anyone.

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The big trade-off with AWS is it allows poor people to afford lavish computing resources for small amounts of time, at the expense of things like performance and reliability. If you have slow, steady growth metrics it makes much more sense to host yourself. Planning for peak capacity and buying only what you need is cheaper than dynamically scaling what you need.

The product is geared to a specific kind of customer, and frankly I have no idea why companies like Netflix use them. Hell, Netflix actually buys whole instance blocks [servers] just to work around the shared i/o of EC2. You'd think just buying a real dedicated server would be cheaper and easier.

Netflix does get massive discounts, though. I remember reading that it's like 70%.

You're right, they do. But most of that discount is available to anybody whose willing to purchase reserved instances.

Well, that plus this bit from the EC2 pricing page:

> Reserved Instances are eligible for volume discounts, which can save you an additional 10% when you spend more than $250,000 on Reserved Instances or an additional 20% when you spend more than $2,000,000 on Reserved Instances. Customers who spend more than $5,000,000 on Reserved Instances should contact us for additional discounts.

Call me crazy, but if I spend 5 million dollars I want to own my hardware, not just rent it, and get some contracts in place.

> The product is geared to a specific kind of customer, and frankly I have no idea why companies like Netflix use them.

I'd imagine Netflix sees enormous fluctuations in required server capacity. Not many people watch movies at work, but when they come home, or when it's a weekend, traffic probably spikes tremendously.

Yes, perhaps we should think of it this way: Netflix wants to run blocks of dedicated servers, but to defray their costs by leasing their excess capacity to thousands of other customers during non-peak hours.

And a cheap way to build out the technical, marketing, and billing architecture for that is to partner with AWS, which has built all that already.

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