Hacker News Reader

Comment by bcoates | Hacker News Reader

I'm trying to figure out where this niche is that EC2 is more expensive than traditional hosting on a price/performance basis and I'm drawing a blank. Yes, they're vastly more expensive than the sticker price on a server (assuming you can size out your server needs years in advance), but most of the cost of running a realistic server are elsewhere, housing/power/cooling, NAS, networking, licences, manpower, spares, security, monitoring... The actual per-hour fees aren't really the top consideration for choosing among the alternatives and AWS is at least competitive on a TCO basis.

The only things I get a big price/performance advantage over AWS for are things I might as well host on my desk, and even there it's dicey.

View on HN

I think a lot of cloud developers have lost touch about what a modern dedicated server is capable of.

In February our website was top 3,000 on Alexa. 150 requests a second on average looking over that month. Those are dynamically generated pages, since all the static assets are served by CDN.

What handles all that?

3 servers running a PHP application. Oh, and the Postgres database is sitting on one of those servers and replicates to one of the others.

We can do it with 2, but we have 3 so that if some of them dies we don't have to worry.

These are the cheapest servers that Softlayer offers and they run at a low load average.

EC2 is more expensive than renting dedicated hardware. Housing/power/cooling/networking/etc are all built-in to that price, not added costs. Colocating your own hardware is not the only option. You can provision someone else's dedicated hardware in under an hour, all costs included, with 24/7 on-site staff to handle failed components or other issues (which again are included in the price).

I'm speccing out some things I host on AWS on softlayer's dedicated hosting, and I'm not coming up with vastly cheaper prices there either. I can get big (compared to ec2) servers cheap but storage costs eat up most of the advantage.

Softlayer, along with Rackspace, are expensive providers. The price will be similar to EC2 (but the raw performance of the CPUs and hard disks will be much better).

Hetzner and OVH provide the starkest contrast when it comes to price. They are also pretty well respected.

There's a million other choices in between. webhostingtalk.com is the best place to get more info..but I can give you names that have been around for a long time and tend to be liked by customers: webnx, singlehop, 100tb (softlayer reseller), reliablesite.net, hivelocity, netdepot. The list goes on and on, but if you want to see price differences, check them out.

https://hivelocity.net/dedicated-servers/specials/

Those are specials but their pricing in general is very good. SoftLayer has some great stuff most hosts don't have but you pay for it.

Just last week I ran the numbers on my current DC costs - hardware, cooling, space, network - versus EC2 and it was 60% more expensive per month for EC2.

Quite a premium. Even adding in the salaries for my admin team only drop it a few more percentage points.

You are making it sounds like EC2 versus dedicated hosting. There are other cloud hosting providers such as Joyent who offer much better performance and reliability at lower price. In Joyent case, they even have experts of the whole stack (Illumos, ZFS, DTrace, KVM) working internally.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com