It would be nice to have a column for a 30.44 day cost (average month).
EC2 is ridiculously expensive, considering the prices at Linode, Hetzner, DigitalOcean, OVH, LeaseWeb and 100tb.
EC2 is ridiculously expensive, considering the prices at Linode, Hetzner, DigitalOcean, OVH, LeaseWeb and 100tb.
From an individual's perspective, that's hard to understand. To a business, it really isn't that difficult to justify the cost.
One of my criticisms of HN commenters is the inability to empathize from a company's POV. Just because it doesn't make sense to you doesn't mean it doesn't make sense!
Companies (especially big ones) have different priorities than individuals. I may think it's stupid to 10x infrastructure costs by using AWS. A company may say "that's 1% of my budget, and it keeps my development running smoothly and developers happy with the familiarity and flexibility. I make that 10x cost back in 30 minutes, every day. Not worth optimizing."
For running large memory and bandwidth hungry servers they just can't deliver. On Amazon you can get 256GB of ram with dedicated 10GBps clustered networking. None of the options you listed can go above 1GBps and it won't be dedicated (you'll get a 1GBps port onto a shared network, and you'll be at the mercy of the traffic conditions inside their data center.)
Amazon also has a huge amount of cloudy solutions which is not to be sneezed at.
http://www.hetzner.de/hosting/produkte_rootserver/dx290
And it costs a fraction of EC2, which would cost you $2556 for 30.44 days.
I could get 10 servers with 1 Gbit each, and it will still be cheaper than EC2.