Amazon Drops Price Of EC2 Dedicated Instances By Up To 80%
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It's still not uncommon to talk to a random startup person and they'll tell you they have hosting costs in the tens of thousands of dollars per year. When you then compare this to what they're actually doing with their servers, it seems to me they're overpaying by several orders of magnitude.
I was using EC2 for years and kind of grew to accept (and ignore) its limitations. It was only when I reviewed some dedicated server plans at other providers I (re-)discovered how much raw power you can get elsewhere for the same money. Additionally, I became very frustrated with the lack of pricing transparency and inability to forecast costs - at first glance the Amazon cloud is as open as it gets but the real surprises come when you're running it for a while.
No doubt Amazon has caught on to this trend and is fighting to squeeze out some competitors that have sprung up. This pricing change is most likely directly aimed at Hetzner and other inexpensive-but-powerful hosting providers. It means they were either massively overcharging the whole time or they are using profits from other plans to offer Dedicated EC2 at a loss until the competition folds.
Ok, that doesn't include EBS and bandwidth. So let's throw in 1TB of outbound data (less than the 2TB that Rackspace includes, but still more than I'd ever use in a month) and a 150GB EBS volume with 1000 provision IOPS. Let's also use the 1 year heavy utilization price while we're at it. Now I'm looking $342/month with $1800 upfront, which amortizes to $492/month.
With AWS I also don't need to stick with paying 24x7 for infrastructure. I don't need to keep my CI infrastructure running on nights and weekends for example, and with AWS I have the flexibility to turn that into cost savings.
So I don't see the order of magnitude price difference. So maybe I shouldn't be looking at Rackspace? Hetzner keeps coming up on here, but I don't need a server in Europe. Maybe OVH? Hmm, the comments on Hacker News don't exactly inspire confidence in OVH for something more than a personal server to screw around with. I need to run infrastructure for my business. Do I start hunting for bargain hosting providers on WebHostingTalk?
Ok, back to AWS it is for me.
EDIT: Thanks for the suggestions to look at Softlayer. A server with 1 CPU and 8GB of RAM starts at $399, which is better than Rackspace, but not exactly orders of magnitude cheaper than the c1.xlarge I mentioned above.
For reference, the dedicated server I rent for my private projects comes in at €49/month and it has these specs:
Intel® Core™ i7-2600 Quad-Core
16 GB DDR 3 RAM
2 x 3 TB SATA 6 Gb/s HDD; 7200 rpm
Or your page cache:
https://blogs.oracle.com/ksplice/entry/attack_of_the_cosmic_...
Ultimately, it's a business decision of risk-management. Also, if you're in any kind of serious business like banking, there is already regulations around the standards of hardware/software you can use.
However, if we can determine what machine models they use (assuming they buy branded hardware), then we will know their chipsets, and from there, we should be able to deduce whether the RAM is ECC or not.
Incero seems cheap, but that's the only thing I've seen about Incero. I consider Incero to be in the bargain hunting on WebHostingTalk category of providers. I'm not entirely comfortable hosting mission critical infrastructure there yet.
I'd recommend Hetzner & OVH, and Softlayer if budget is less of an issue.
[1]http://www.crucial.com/uk/store/mpartspecs.aspx?mtbpoid=36C1...
[2]http://www.crucial.com/uk/store/mpartspecs.aspx?mtbpoid=9137...
ECC memory: http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=...
Regular memory: http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=...
I've bought a number of large servers recently (using owned servers at colocation in combination with virtual hosts for DR and geo-sharding), and always equip them with 192GB or more. The pricing of memory is so incredibly low it makes no sense otherwise, yet all of these dedicated server vendors act as if 2GB is the norm and 4GB is the advanced upgrade.
Xeon X3450 Quad Core, 32GB ECC RAM, 2x 500GB HD, and 2TB/month bandwidth plus a whole bunch of extra IPs allowing me to run numerous jails for hosting all sorts of sites and dev-environments. Very good machine for the price. You can still pick one up [3].
[1] http://www.m5hosting.com [2] They are also working on a an amazon AWS competitor service. [3] http://www.m5hosting.com/buynow.php
https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing
$80/month
8GB Memory 4 Cores 80GB SSD Disk 5TB Transfer
The really sad part (for AWS competitors) is that once you get into reserved instance pricing and spot pricing, it removes a lot of the cost difference. The competition is years behind, and getting further behind every month.
But that's looking at it from just a cash perspective. If your time is worth money (and you have funding), setting up things on AWS will save you a ton of money since you can take advantage of pretty good services like RDS, ELB, Elasticache, SQS, Route53, etc that will allow you to get your product to market faster with a smaller team.
Also, we got DoS attacks all the time on their network and not one since we moved to our own hardware... Obviously take this with a grain of salt, but take the other comments to heart and actually look into other dedicated provider pricing. You might be surprised.
They're great and cheap.
I've used a very reputable host by the name of WebNX out of Los Angeles for a long time. They blow your referenced prices out of the water.
How does this sound?
Intel Xeon 1230 v3; 32gb ram; 4x 1TB 7,200 rpm enterprise hdd w/ hardware raid 10; 20tb of outbound bandwidth; unmetered inbound bandwidth; $239
Or swap out the 4x drives for 512 ssd and 1tb 7200rpm, for $199 instead.
That v3 1230 pushes 9500 on passmark.
Back to AWS? Not a chance.
There are many other smaller hosting companies that offer good services and pricing. You just need to do some researchs.
And, with dedicated hardware, you have faster storage with traditional HDD and even SSD. Both those options are faster than EC2 storage.
And, better customer service too.
No, it starts at $219. You can add more RAM to any of their hardware options. So the cheapest 1CPU-box is $159 plus $60/mo for the RAM upgrade.
By the way, Hetzner is very good, and the connectivity to the US is great. Visitors would not notice the extra couple of routing hops.
The startup I'm at has looked at using AWS and repeatedly decided against it based on cost. It's simply much more expensive compared to dedicated hardware when you need a single high-performance box -- and you should be able to serve a whole fuckton of traffic an 8-cpu 32GB box if you try.
Now it's IBM running the show at SL...
You need to negotiate. The advertised prices are starting points for talking to sales, not what you really have to pay.
You can get a 2011-gen quad-core Xeon with 16GB RAM for $250/mo or thereabouts at Softlayer.
This is probably still overpaying for my needs, but substantially cheaper than buying via their web interface.
Another thing I haven’t done is renegotiate in the last 2 years. Moore’s law and all, I suspect I wouldn’t save $$ but would get more horespower for the same price.
Are you using OVH for hosting Exocortex? I checked your website and it seems to be hosted on Linode.
On the other end, Softlayer is very reliable, I have 4 servers with them and I had nearly no problems, they have the best network as well (I got fewer network outage with Softlayer then Rackspace).
Rackspace is better if you need something managed, but they are expensive.
I am not paying for AWS because I am dumb, I am paying for AWS because they provide services that allow me to outsource the high durability to them. Someone show me an actual alternative please, rather than just repeating "zomghosting.biz gives you a million gigs for $20!!1".
...and the people who criticize AWS aren't dumb, either. AWS brings a lot to the table, and also takes a few things off the table. AWS's scaling and combo of services are both wonderful, but they come at the cost of performance and price.
Most companies don't need "click of a button"-type scaling of instances. And most people don't need all of AWS' services; replacing them with good, stable open-source software alternatives (eg., RabbitMQ for SQS, Riak for Dynamo, Postgres for RDS), while incurring a higher admin cost, is not non-trivial.
My company replaced all of our AWS instances with co-located servers a couple of years ago. Our servers were basically static; we did not rely on any dynamic scaling of instances, and since we are in Europe, we couldn't rely on datacenter distribution, either. The performance difference was extreme. The servers were cheap, but they still blew Amazon out of the water. We could easily afford two 32-core database servers within our budget, and their performance translates to a whole bunch of Amazon's fastest instances.
The up-front hardware costs were less than what we were paying per year to Amazon. We have an entire rack now, and I think we are paying something like $1,500/mo for the entire hosting package. (It may be a little more, but not much.)
Hardware maintenance costs have been negligible so far, and the redundancy built into our infrastructure and stack means we don't have to rush out the door if a box dies on us.
I didn't say they were. I asked them to provide an alternative rather than pretending a single dedicated server is comparable to AWS.
>Most companies
I don't care what most companies need. I am not trying to argue, I am asking the people insisting that nobody should ever use amazon to provide a reasonable alternative or stop making sweeping generalizations.
>We could easily afford two 32-core database servers within our budget, and their performance translates to a whole bunch of Amazon's fastest instances.
Did you seriously not notice how you aren't addressing anything I said, but just repeating exactly what I pointed out wasn't relevant? I don't need more cores, I need reliable storage. What is my EBS? Until we're big enough to be running our own datacenters, there's not really a reasonable alternative that I can find. I am asking for advice, not "more cores!".
I suggest you change that aggressive, pouty tone of yours. I was addressing a specific point in your comment, not disagreeing with you.
The latter is what EC2 is most useful for for me: You can cut costs of your dedicated hosting by going much closer to the wire with the knowledge you can spin up instances at EC2 (and/or other cloud providers) if you should happen to hit the front page somewhere that can drive massive traffic faster / on more transient basis than you can or want to scale up your dedicated setup.
Hetzner is great, but fully integrated providers like Softlayer is another growing threat - many providers now offer a sliding scale of some or all from colo, to managed bare metal, to "dedicated virtual" (single VM per physical server, automatically deployed in minutes or hours as a "halfway house" to cloud setups), to cloud images billed similarly to EC2. It'll be interesting to see what IBM tries to do with Softlayer...
So what if you're spending $25k a year where a colo'd rack would be only $5k, that's not your major cost center in a startup (or any business for that matter). If you are utilizing the benefits of AWS it could well tip the scales in terms of not needing to have a $150k systems engineer.
With EC2, the hourly rate is outrageous for an always-on server. You really need to buy reserved instances for it to be cost-effective. In my case I found I really needed to buy the 3-year heavy utilization reserved instances.
The hourly rate is best just for occasional spikes or when you're experimenting with different hardware configurations.
And yes, they were massively overcharging for dedicated instances, as they charged $7300 per month just for the privilege of being able to use dedicated instances (that doesn't include the cost of the instance itself.) I always assumed they were doing so just to reserve that feature for their big customers.
Using reserved instances is the exact opposite of what anyone should be doing. The only way to get price competitive with EC2 is to go the absolute other direction: establish a baseline with dedicated/colo and use spot instances for tasks or to handle peaks.
This cost tends to be better than buying hardware, but it's much higher than what you pay for dedicated (often $0 upfront...or $25-$200).
Yes, this. When you're worried about cash flow, overpaying every month can seem safer than paying the upfront cost to reserve instances.
A lot of people are completely blinkered when it comes to the cost of using AWS.
So, you can get that $10,000/yr dedicated server for $10/yr elsewhere? What host is that. I need to check them out.
But this ignores the cost of paying someone to setup/maintain that rack, cost to fix the server when something goes wrong, etc.
Setup/maintenance of physical infrastructure has a cost too.
A lot of conversation is about the cost of acquisition, but does not compare the prices of maintenance, hardware failure/outages, and recovery.
For example, with dedicated hardware and a guessed failure rate, how much does it cost, over time, to 1) replace the hardware, software, and configuration and 2) value lost (could be goodwill, could be $$$) due to outage.
With AWS using chef/puppet/salt/etc., it's trivial to boot up new nodes and down the malfunctioning ones. The value of that is super high.
And let's not mention emr; a $15k/mo cluster in softlayer did something like 5x the performance of an emr cluster that was costing (and running!) $2k/day.
Do you have any data on how pure S3 storage is priced relative to other solutions?
When I worked at start-up the lead dev seemed to be heavily bought into the hype of "cloud" hosting, so he used Engine Yard. The founders got freaked out at the cost for what was negligible traffic. We then moved to Amazon, which equally freaked them out.
If you don't have money to burn, then consider going down the standard hosting route.
Dedicated instances, charged on top of the regular price, are where you are guaranteed not to have anyone else on the same host server as you. Dedicated instances already cost 10% more than their regular counterparts (small/dedicated/on-demand costs 6.6/c hr vs 6c/hr.)
At any point, the most you could be "wasting", was the leftover capacity on a host that only had one small server on it (they didn't do micro). Imagine a simplified version of EC2 as per [1], which fits 12 small instances on one physical host, and you could therefore be wasting 11 slots that you could run a m1.small in. They can't sell these to any other customer. If you buy a second instance, they put that on your first host; you are now wasting 10 slots. Carry on down to when you fill up your first host and spill over onto a second, back to wasting 11 slots.
Previously they were charging $10/hour for those wasted 11 slots, which you could have filled by paying 72.6c/hr. Now, they're only charging $2.
[1] http://perfcap.blogspot.co.uk/2011/03/understanding-and-usin...
Not to detract from the conversation, but I've pointed out numerous times about techcrunch / this author -- FREDERIC LARDINOIS -- nearly plagiarizing the the entirety of his sources in the many articles, of his, posted here. Maybe it's not strictly plagiarism, but there is almost NEVER value added by his regurgitation. It has got to be etiquette to link to the best source, and Techcrunch has really gone south with the AOL/HuffPo relations -- cheap content rewrites and not a source.
The company that I am a developer at has aggressively adopted AWS with applications using it at both the PaaS and IaaS levels. At the end of the day what we've received the greatest value from isn't an impressive "cost per compute unit", but rather a flexibility that would be incredibly painful to let go of. For example, our QA team can spin up or tear down entire environments by chatting with our Campfire bot. Our developers can do likewise using a simple CLI we built.
Granted, this isn't exactly bleeding edge stuff here... it's simply "the cloud" (apologies) delivering on the promise of dynamic, elastic environments. But it's a really, really nice promise, and at risk of sounding like an advertisement, I'll still say that AWS/EC2 has delivered quite nicely on it.
Check out incero.com or securedservers.com for some perspective.
also serverbear.com is always great to check for price-performance comparisons, especially taking into account SSD performance.
I'm not sure how things work if you're a larger client with needs in the dozens of servers.
The FedRAMP program has also established a Joint Accreditation Board (JAB) consisting of Chief Information Officers from DoD, DHS and GSA.
We're planning to (eventually) utilize Amazon to temporarily add capacity when necessary, but it will never be our primary hosting solution.
People who were paying full price prior to this rebate must feel pretty annoyed right now.
People are used to the prices of things going down as economies of scale kick in. That doesn't mean it actually _happened_ here, but if you were already a happy customer at $100/month, when next month comes around and it's $20, you're just more happy.
What one should do depends on one's goals. To maximize profits, and ignoring the costs involved in doing so, one should charge each customer what that individual customer is willing to pay. Approximating this is a big motivation most market segmentation schemes.
Of course, doing so naively can maximize short-term profits while negatively affecting goodwill, which can then hurt long term profits.
Also, even ignoring goodwill, pricing to maximize returns from the current market for a good or service can limit the ability to develop new markets for it.
There you have the American university system in a nutshell, though you might have to substitute "able" for "willing".
Especially given the rhetoric about how 'economics' drives things down to the marginal cost, it's not super surprising, as a general rule. People assume that competition won't allow prices to get too much higher than costs.
Some people here may find this ironic, but I always remember this rule because I'm (depending on the day) a Marxist.
Just one reason competition is generally good for consumers, even though on a macro level one could argue that competition is inefficient.
Yeah, like we've heard for years, this is coming real soon, just around the corner, here before we know it, any day now...
I think you mean uncorrelated with the underlying cost of the service. If the price were uncorrelated with the value, people wouldn't have subscribed to AWS in the first place?
Dedicated being different from 100% utilization reserved servers
http://aws.amazon.com/dedicated-instances/ vs http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/ (which did not get 80% cuts)
We've dropped our prices a number of times, the lastest a few months ago:
We've plenty of customers who migrate to us when they "hit it big". It's no secret that that's where Engine Yard has been positioned for a long time.
The point of us dropping prices was so we could pass value onto our customers.
"CC2 and CR1 Instances are backed by 2 x Intel Xeon E5-2670 processors, eight-cores with hyperthreading"
Am I missing anything or is there a benefit to doing a dedicated cc2.8xlarge instance? Compliance maybe?
The process was smooth and enjoyable, and now I'm spending less than half as much as I was with EC2.
I even got to try their recovery console after I mistakenly deleted the root password without first giving myself sudo. Worked like a charm.
Anyone else do something similar? If not, you are going to see people stick with the vendor they know best.
32Gb/i7.
I used them for 5 weeks, in that five week period I had 5 1-2 day blocks where the machine was unreachable.
>A incoming attack influence the network for few minutes. The network department has solved the issue.
few minutes was 31 hours
our network-team told us, that there was again an attack which caused the issues you mentioned.
27 hours
currently we can't see any issue, is this still given?
connection timed out (no idea how long as I'd not installed monitoring at that point).
etc etc.
I canceled shortly after.
I'm back on Linode for now (I actually changed the design of the product I'm developing so that I can store files onto S3 so I can stay with Linode and move easily in the future).
A fast server is a paperweight without reliable network access.
I am not particularly keen to move entirely to them, however, as I just have a gut feeling I'd prefer to have the service of someone like Linode in a true emergency. As a high powered server for experiments, side projects or things that don't demand 100% uptime (e.g. my company's collaboration software), however, Hetzner has proven superb so far.
They've been hacked badly twice and both times withheld information from their customers. Bizarre that you would prefer this type of service than from others.
12:13:14 up 183 days, 21:23, 2 users, load average: 0.51, 0.55, 0.49
The problem is unreliability of hardware. When one of the hard disks broke in the previous server, it was faster to setup a new server to transfer everything rather than waiting for the repair.
That said, it did spur a month-long effort to truly revamp my dusty backup-and-restore process so I'm in a much better position for when it happens again.
A failed HDD should NEVER, EVER, bring a server down.
I'm strongly advising against cheep providers like ovh or hetzner without proper redundancy.
Others on my radar are https://hivelocity.net and http://www.100tb.com/ - at the VPS level, http://buyvm.net/ and http://prgmr.com/xen/ are both cheap for the quality you appear to get (but I can't yet vouch for this directly).
Solar or wind.
What a hypocrisy. This should be read as "polices require that an adequate and predictable I/O performance could be provided".