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Comment by floridaguy01 | Hacker News Reader

aws is silly expensive. Why didnt you build this on top of digitalocean? Digitalocean is so awesome right now. They dont even charge for bandwidth overages.

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Digitalocean is silly expensive. Why don't you look at Atlantic.net they are so awesome and charge way less than overpriced digitalocean. Why not run it on your laptop which you've already paid for, that would be even cheaper than overpriced atlantic.net!

Unless I am missing something Atlantic.net is 1-10 cents cheaper then digitalocean?

https://www.vultr.com/pricing/ is 20% cheaper right now at least.

My old laptop offers much better price/performance, especially when I use free wifi in coffee shops for bandwidth. The laptop is already paid for so I only pay for the electricity (on days when I don't plug it into the wall at a friend's place to save even more). Those prices are just too expensive. There's always a place willing to do a job cheaper...

DO's "most popular plan" is $10/mo [1] AWS's t2.micro in us-east is ~$10.30/mo with a standard 8GB disk [2]

Both VMs are single core, 1GB RAM. DO gives you 30GB SSD, but AWS has a freely adjustable disk size. Upscaling from 8 to 30GB is another $2 - but how many single-core low ram instances use double-digit GB?

In the middle, DO has 8 core, 16GB for $160/mo, AWS has 4 core 16GB for 185/mo + storage.

At the top end of the DO offerings, DO's 20-core 64GB machine in $640/mo, and AWS's 16-core 64GB machine is $725mo + storage (not much). The difference in pricing is not that crazy, and you get a crapload of extra free features on AWS.

Those AWS prices are with the "On-Demand pricing". If you're willing to lock-in for a year, reduce by 1/3. The argument that DO is "OMG cheaper" than AWS is no longer valid.

[1] https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/ [2] http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/

You seem to make the implicit assumption that a DO $10 VPS is equal in performance to a AWS t2.micro instance, which is not the case. For an example, check out:

http://serverbear.com/compare?Sort=Host&Order=asc&Server+Typ...

DO 1GB instance at $10/month has a UnixBench of 1041 [1], to beat that with AWS you have to spend $374/month.

Also, with the t2.micro you get an EBS disk, whose I/O you have to pay in addition to the instance cost. You also have to pay for the bandwidth out of the chosen AWS region. This is not the case on DO.

AWS complicated pricing makes comparison like yours very difficult and error-prone: I would suggest to go with AWS only if you need the particular features (like ELB, SQS, VPC, etc.) that DO doesn't offer.

[1] http://serverbear.com/1989-1gb-ssd--1-cpu-digitalocean [2] http://serverbear.com/240-extra-large-amazon-web-services

Unixbench is a pretty awful benchmark unless the only thing you care about is disk IO (unlikely for a typical web app). The site you linked to doesn't even have data for AWS t2 instances types, so not really a useful data point for your comparison. The site only has data for instance types listed as "previous generation instances".

It takes a little more effort to find it but they have data for t2 instances, for example:

http://serverbear.com/166-micro-amazon-web-services

Do you know of any other benchmark that paints a different picture?

Check out http://www.cloudharmony.com/benchmarks for something with more current data.

You seem to be ignoring my two other data points. Similarly, bandwidth costs are small, unless you're really pumping out a lot of data. I don't even notice our EBS transfer costs on our bill.

And how reliable a measure is UnixBench, when the top-performing server "CC2 Large" (by a factor of 25% over second place!) is a 2-core, 8GB RAM offering? It easily beats out all the two-dozen core, high-ram offerings below it.

Hell, the names of the AWS instances in that list aren't even correct. What's a "high-cpu medium"? They mean a "c1.medium" from looking at the stats page, which is now two generations obsolete - you have to know about them and go out of your way to provision one. The one name they do list, "m3.medium", is incorrectly labelled a "high i/o" VM; AWS doesn't have a "high i/o" VM, and the m3.medium is not considered by them to be network-, ram-, or storage-optimised, so I'm not sure where that's coming from. And if you do need disk i/o with AWS, you can provision reserved i/o (not very expensive), which needs to be accounted for in these comparisons. It's just getting my goat at the moment, because my comment was trying to argue against FUD, but that reference list can't even get well-known and advertised names correct.

AWS billing is complex, absolutely, but there is also a ton of flexibility, and it makes sense once you pass the learning curve. And micros do get throttled, but they also get a certain number of "throttle credits" that help them survive bursts. And yes, I agree that you should choose the right tool for the right job - one HNer really uses that huge amount of free bandwidth you get with the small DO servers with a media streaming service (I forget the handle). But that still doesn't change the fact that AWS is no longer "OMG expensive!" over DO.

"But they'd be wrong! Truth is, I thought it mattered. I thought that [the marginal hosting costs between cloud service providers] mattered. But does it bollocks. Not compared to how [developer productivity and costs] matter."[0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3tFZxhVaXo

Yes, and going with AWS kills productivity because you have to learn AWS specific APIs, you're locked into their system and then you have to re-work your stuff to be hosted elsewhere when you outgrow AWS.

More than one startup has been killed purely by AWS hosting costs in the past 5 years.

    > going with AWS kills productivity because you have to
    > learn AWS specific APIs

Products I use:

* Redshift. It's Postgres's API, and I didn't have to learn how to manage petabyte-scale clusters

* EC2. It's Ubuntu. Or CentOS. Or whatever. You choose! Except no messing about with my own virtualization or hardware agreements or going ot the datacenter.

* RDS. It's whichever database you want it to be! Only it scales! And backsup! For free!

* ElastiCache. It's Redis!

etc. etc. etc.

Learning those dang AWS-specific APIs, eh? Who'd do it?

     > has been killed purely by AWS hosting costs

Then they planned badly, because AWS prices consistently go down over time. If your "business" goes under because it becomes popular, then your marginal cost per user is negative, and you're running a charity for the benefit of your users, not a business. Blaming the demise of a company whose business model is giving out free icecream on the cost of icecream is missing the point a little.

Haha, except AWS doesn't lock your account randomly or stop droplets for benign abuse reports.

Also, OP required Redshift. DO does not offer that.

DO is great for a lot of things, but it's not AWS. You can't allocate extra disk to a droplet, for example. AWS is a _much_ more complete offering than DO.

Agreed... AWS and Azure both offer a lot of services beyond just VPS hosting. Hosted database services, and extended blob/s3 storage are pretty valuable in and of themselves.

DO/Linode don't offer the equivalent, which means maintaining your own.. which is fine, but if you're relatively small, or a single person... time you dedicate to operations tasks is time you aren't developing features and/or fixing bugs. One's business is paramount... technology is just a tool to serve that.

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