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Comment by mrb | Hacker News Reader

OVH is much less expensive than Amazon EC2... Someone said in a HN discussion earlier this week that he was not able to find providers significantly cheaper than Amazon. Well OVH proves this is possible.

This OVH dedicated server is comparable to an Amazon EC2 Standard small (m1.small) instance. Taking an Amazon reserved instance, "heavy utilization" (to minimize cost), and in their less expensive region, with a 1-year term, the upfront payment is $169 plus $0.014 per hour, which amounts to $24.30 per month.

Compare this to OVH is only 3€, that is $4.00 per month... 1/6th the price! And OVH has 500GB storage vs 160GB for Amazon!

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>Someone said in a HN discussion earlier this week that he was not able to find providers significantly cheaper than Amazon

Yes but EC2 is a cloud provider and these are dedicated machines which are harder to scale without setting up a complex cluster.

You have API to order new server on OVH but it's not delivery instant

They have this in beta: https://www.ovh.co.uk/cloud/public-cloud.xml

People don't use AWS because it's cheap. People use it because its scalable. You can deploy hundreds of new servers in minutes literally to meet any demand. You pay for that flexibility.

People use it because they think they need the scalability. The reality is that almost nobody that use EC2 have the ability to scale up or down that quickly, and even fewer needs it:

Most sites have a fairly stable base load, and most dedicated providers these day can provision in less than 24 hours, so you at most need the ability to handle short spikes or growth over hours rather than days.

And EC2 is expensive enough that you can handle huge variations by buying extra dedicated capacity to cope. But the (far) cheaper option still is to handle your base load on a cheaper provider, and build your system to be able to scale using EC2 or another cloud provider to handle spikes.

WIth more and more providers providing "hybrid" services with colocation, dedicated, dedicated vms (single vm per physical server), and cloud servers all (or most) on offer from one location, this gets even easier - you can sometimes even get virtual private lans across dedicated and cloud servers without having to mess with your own vpn or pay for the bandwidth

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