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Comment by jules | Hacker News Reader

Given the premium that Amazon charges, how does this compare to dedicated servers? And why are dedicated servers in the US so much more expensive than in Europe?

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Their engineer answered earlier in the thread. It was more along the lines of they had a small team and needed to scale up quickly (which I think is probably most of these EC2 stories you see, really). He also said that now their engineering team has more breathing room and considering dedicated/colo would be in the cards.

Scale and operation. European operators that open up in America also provide cheap pricing. See OVH for example. Pinterest could easily get 80 servers by them for $5/hr.

power is cheaper in Europe than in the US

Nope, it's the reverse, so that can't be the case. Some quick googling: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_pricing US is between 8-17 cents. EU is 20-30+.

http://www.energy.eu/

That wikipedia article is not enough to back your claim. As you can see, it lists a lot caveats. In my limited knowledge, electricity pricing is quite complicated, and those numbers are probably not even close to what business and industry are actually paying.

Edit: The blog-post is more convincing, but again, are those numbers really comparable? Maybe they are, I don't know enough about the subject, I just find it a little too simple to just compare numbers from different websites without deep knowledge of the topic.

Here's another link, the prices differ (?): http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/statistics_explained/index....

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