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Comment by niggler | Hacker News Reader

Is there any scale (like xlarge) where you are effectively the only VM on a particular physical machine (thereby obviating the issue with the small instances)?

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...and here's part of why I created Uptano.

https://uptano.com

The flexibility of usage-based billing and instant provisioning is awesome, but it's really not worth giving up dedicated performance IMHO.

I upvoted because I love HN comments that offer solutions. That said . . . how can you charge half as much as Amazon for the same service and make a profit. I assume their margins are not that fat, so what are you cutting that they offer? Or else what secret have you discovered that no one knows? I guess since this is your business there's a chance that you won't answer, but I'm curious.

AWS uses high end, expensive enterprise grade parts (I believe), meanwhile uptano is likely using standard off the shelf parts, likely with bulk account discounts. Each of those servers could likely be put together for $500 - at $100/month, he should be making very good margins after a year or so. I have no idea on rent/electricity/etc, but with enough 1U servers the total cost per server may be only $10/month or so.

The big costs you pay for on AWS are the engineering, networking and UI development. Dedicated servers should be easier to provision and manage and he probably has a much smaller team.

So theoretically, it is possible that his prices are half as much as Amazon and he still makes a decent profit.

More like giant margins...

http://blog.carlmercier.com/2012/01/05/ec2-is-basically-one-...

Amazon reserved instances cost 2 to 10 times the price of renting a private dedicated server at your random dedicated server hosting service.

Compare youself: https://www.ovh.com/us/dedicated-servers/

I've been looking for this for...ages...

Thank you...so much for posting this.

This still uses virtualization though, correct? So you don't get full dedicated performance?

We're using OpenVZ for this reason. It's very close to bare metal performance, with the advantages of virtualization.

That service looks absolutely awesome. Just signed up and had a look - but I miss a major thing: API.

The system is built on an internal API. We just need to expose a version!

You can pay a (hefty) fee for dedicated tenancy, where your EC2 instances only share servers with other instances in your account.

The largest instances (the quad- and octuple-extra-large) likely are on their own servers but I've never seen that explicitly confirmed anywhere.

You can pay extra for dedicated Instances: http://aws.amazon.com/dedicated-instances/

> Dedicated Instances are Amazon EC2 instances launched within your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) that run hardware dedicated to a single customer.

$10/hour per region? Wow.

To be fair, though:

"An additional fee is charged once per hour in which at least one Dedicated Instance of any type is running in a Region."

So it's not like they are charging $10/hr/instance (so it amortizes over all of the dedicated instances)

Still, that's 100k a year, not including the cost of the actual instances. Not an option for smaller services unless your stuff simply can't be made to work without dedicated instances.

I doubt it would ever make sense to use this over dedicated servers, except at a large scale.

c1.xlarges are thought to be effectively the only VM on a machine. I can't dig up the article that proposed the methodology for determining offhand.

c1.xlarges still underperform far under what I'd expect.

Are VMs ever really performant?

Compared to the 26 ECU m3.2xl, the 20 ECU c1.xl underperforms it by 3x (basic web, JSON struct) in my tests.

Modern hypervisors have an overhead as low as 2%, so yes, they absolutely are. It is often worth virtualizing simply for the flexibility/management that it bring, even if it's a single virtual machine on a very large box.

Somewhere between uptano and EC2 is internap (formerly Voxel.net) agileservers: http://www.internap.com/agile/

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