Hacker News Reader

Comment by bpatrianakos | Hacker News Reader

I'm in your same position exactly but unfortunately the options aren't good for what you (and me) will use it for. Before this price drop a Micro instance would run you about $15 - $20 monthly. About the same as I pay for my 512 Linode. But I've heard horror stories about the CPU on the Micro not being able to handle any amount of moderate traffic for more than a few minutes at a time. So then there's the Small instances which are, at least for me, ideal anyway but when you do the math on a Small instance running 24/7 each month with just 10GB of EBS storage you get up past $60 a month. Okay, not bad - pretty close to VPS pricing, actually. But $60/month is a lot for me to spend on hosting a blog so its not for me. I don't know about you. Maybe your priorities and financial situation is different. I'm not hurting at all financially, I'm just cheap (which is why I'm not hurting financially).

View on HN

Micro uses a different CPU provisioning model than all the other instance types. While most instances have a guaranteed CPU allotment, micro instances do not. They can burst up to two ECU, but will eventually be limited to something around 0.1 ECU if you exceed the burst period.

That's not to say they don't have their uses, but they will not handle much traffic unless its heavily cached (but then you only have so much memory).

If you have a blog that is static and uses external js components for things like comments (disqus), you could use it in conjunction with cloudfront to handle quite a bit more traffic. Most traffic would be routed via cloudfront. Admin panel would be handled on a subdomain.

This is exactly the sort of thing reserved instances would be good for (when you know it is going to be in use 24/7).

A three year reserved instance would be significantly less than $60 per month. The upfront reserve price of $300 over 36 months comes out to $8.33/month. Throw in an approximate cost of $14/month for the use of the compute time, EBS, network traffic.

That brings your monthly cost to just under $23/month, for a grand total of nearly $830 over a 36 month period.

You can run a small reserved instance for $11.71/month (with $195 prepayment for the year). That comes out to about $27.96/month, plus data transfer fees. If you prepay for 3 years, it averages out to about $17.85/month.

I'd rather pay $20 a month for a VPS that I don't have to prepay for.

I will probably stick with my Linode then. Thanks for the info.

I prefer Linode over EC2.

Amazon EC2 Micro instances have very poor performance - sure they have 1.7GB Memory but they have shocking performance. Not worth the price for small websites/blogs.

EC2 Micro instances always had and always will have only 613MB RAM

Reply on news.ycombinator.com