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If you end up in the lightsail world and you are not utilising Amazon's other services then its probably cheaper to do this with another provider. Someone like
by PaulKeeble 6y ago
If you end up in the lightsail world and you are not utilising Amazon's other services then its probably cheaper to do this with another provider. Someone like Contabo or Hetzner will get you VMs at substantially less cost with similar fixed hardware and just give you the box but for a lot less a month. At these low scales with a completely open source stack Amazon isn't good value in my opinion. It is as you grow and it provides the scale that it becomes valuable.
- robertlagrant 6y agoThis is interesting. Do you have (or know of) a published comparison somewhere?
- EGreg 6y agoWould like to see this too
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- dx034 6y agoI don't have a comparison but Hetzner is pretty much unbeatable in price if you can live with having your servers in Europe. If not, OVH, DigitalOcean, Linote or Vultr are good alternatives with datacenters around the globe and prices below that of AWS.
- mxschumacher 6y agoI know that hetzner is affordable, but is digital ocean really cheaper than AWS?
- uaas 6y agoThat would largely depend on your usecase.
- callmeal 6y ago>If not, OVH, DigitalOcean, Linote or Vultr are good alternatives with datacenters around the globe and prices below that of AWS. Sure they're below AWS, but if you compare lightsail, they're pretty much identical. https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/ https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/pricing/?opdp1=pricing https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/pricing/?opdp1=pricing
- martin_a 6y agoWhat kind of comparison are you expecting? Go to hetzner.de, create an account, fire up one of their 5€/month VPS and see if it runs your application well. If it doesn't, upgrade the VPS (or whatever) till the max or until you decide that AWS or whatnot might be better suited (or cheaper). It's nothing personal against you, but those comparisons aren't worth anything. They are highly specific to the test case, which might very likely not be like the stuff you are trying to run. And I've just so often seen people on StackOverflow ask how to fix their AWS setup to run a simple WordPress site, it's unbelievable. There's this old saying: "If the only tool you've got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." That pretty much works for GC/AWS/Azure, too.
- number6 6y agoThis is how I roll out my services. Always wondered if I need AWS, but always lacked the use case.
- sumedh 6y agoI think hetzner has servers in Germany and Finland only, not the right choice for most people here.
- unixhero 6y agoHosting in Finland and Germany is a great choice for a lot of the right reasons.
- smerdyakov 6y agoAdditionally, because it is hosted in Germany, you need to send them a copy of your ID and I found that their support was quite amateurish. So for me the process was: Go to hetzner.de, create an account, it gets instantly closed because you have a UK driving licence but were born elsewhere (perhaps too complicated for them?). Never had that from AWS or OVH.
- mmahemoff 6y agoYou can't learn everything by just trying the service though. Particularly on issues like downtime, support, and how they handle spikes. Also some providers have been known to artificially elevate resources for new users until they're locked in.
- shoo 6y agoFor heztner, just read the list prices for dedicated servers: https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/ https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/ or maybe https://www.hetzner.com/sb https://www.hetzner.com/sb For example, a dedicated "AX51-NVMe" server for 65 euro / month = 73 usd / month gives you: AMD Ryzen 7 3700X Octa-Core (8 physical aka 16 logical cores), RAM: 64 GB DDR4 ECC, NVMe: 2x 1 TB NVMe SSD, unlimited traffic. That's less than half the cost of lightsail per logical core, or less than 1/4 of the cost of lightsail per GB of ECC ram.
- caballeto 6y agoThat seems like a very powerful machine at an incredibly low cost. The closest equivalent at DigitalOcean is RAM 64 GB, 16 CPUs, 1.25 TB SSD, 9 TB transfer at $320/month. If I understand correctly the DO instance will have lower performance because it's virtual, and not bare metal. That amounts to about 4-5x difference in price, which is tremendous, considering that I thought DO to be the one of the cheapest providers. Is this comparison correct or am I missing something?
- redis_mlc 6y agoDedicated servers are very cheap.
- alephu5 6y agohttps://toys.lerdorf.com/low-cost-vps-testing#hetzner https://toys.lerdorf.com/low-cost-vps-testing#hetzner Here you go
- jwr 6y agoI created a comparison myself, because I couldn't find one. It was for my specific workload, which is CPU-intensive, but could be useful for others, too. An important find was that what we are being sold are not "cores", but "vCPUs", which usually correspond to hyperthreads, on slow Xeons. Which means no performance to speak of if the machine is loaded, which it usually is. My conclusion was to rent physical servers (I use Hetzner) and get great performance at a fraction of the price. https://jan.rychter.com/enblog/cloud-server-cpu-performance-comparison-2019-12-12 https://jan.rychter.com/enblog/cloud-server-cpu-performance-...
- caballeto 6y agoGreat read, thanks! I would definitely consider using dedicated servers instead of VPCs. AWS seems to be ridiculously overpriced.
- jbverschoor 6y agoAWS initially was never meant for this type of workload. It started with epiphemeral instances, available for a fixed workload, billed by the hour, such as batch jobs. It turned out people were willing to pay $100 a month for a box worth $30 a month.
- zxcmx 6y agoMachines provisioned by API were not mainstream in 2006, the "cheap" way to host was shared hosting, and dedicated / cpanel boxes were more common than VMs. Actually, pretty sure "vservers" were a big thing at the time and kind of fit where cheap VMs do now. AWS was a very different product and not really comparable to other things available at the time.
- murukesh_s 6y agoAlso the elasticity and backing by a company that had seen the scale themselves, and can possible deliver for you. I remember being a then startup and boxes costing more than 2x the money we were somehow attracted to it and kept it as the option we would move if we ever had a revenue.. Large companies probably spent more than their AWS bills on software license fees (Oracle/ERP/SAP etc) and employee salaries so they don't care.
- Hello71 6y agoLinode started in 2003. Just because there was no DigitalOcean shoveling money into the free credits pit of venture capitalism doesn't mean that affordable VPS services didn't exist. According to https://www.programmableweb.com/api/linode https://www.programmableweb.com/api/linode, Linode started offering an API before 2008.
- jbverschoor 6y agoDO had one of the best ads, or a least one of the best targeted / positioned ads. "You've been developing like a beast, and you app is ready to go live" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vHZLCahai4Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vHZLCahai4Q
- amq 6y agoOr DigitalOcean, which also offers many of the big-cloud perks like managed db, object storage, load balancers and kubernetes.
- 4lun 6y agoYep, now that DO has managed DB instances it’s become my go to provider for most setups. Droplets (VPS) have generally worked out cheaper than EC2 (with more resources) for me. The bit that initially sold me on it a while ago was no more worrying about CPU credits, ie consistently maxing the CPU out at 100% then getting throttled, on the small instances (T2). Also the web interface isn’t a mishmash of 1000 services with different UX for each section. If DO isn’t cheap enough for people there’s also Vultr which works out even cheaper ($2.50 a month for 1cpu/512mb) if you want something similar (not baremetal).
- PetahNZ 6y agoIs the bottom of the barrel VM's really what AWS is aiming for though? Or is it the auto scaling, variable, HA workloads...
- closeparen 6y agoDepending on the amplitude of your load cycle, it may be cheaper to just stay fully provisioned all the time on another provider.
- rozenmd 6y agoDo you host your entire stack on DO, or split compute and DB (and eat the latency hit)?
- sumedh 6y ago> Vultr which works out even cheaper ($2.50 a month for 1cpu/512mb) I can see that price on the pricing page but when I go the Deploy new server page, I cant see that price, the minimum is $5.
- 6y ago
- root993 6y agoHello, author here. We definitely considered using other cloud providers like DO, linode, etc. But it was important for us to go with AWS because we needed some of the other services that AWS providers like s3, Route53, etc. Some of our static websites are in fact hosted entirely using CloudFront + s3 combination which is something I forgot to mention in this post :)
- charlesdm 6y agoI'm not an expert on AWS, but can't you use all those services without AWS?
- setr 6y agoI'm not sure whether you're confusing AWS for some specific component of AWS, or whether you're just stating that competitors exist for those techs But for the former: AWS is a whole suite of tools -- the specified technologies (cloudfront, S3, etc) are individual (and mostly decoupled) tools within that suite
- antonvs 6y agoIf you mean can you use S3 and Route53 etc. while hosting your servers somewhere other than AWS, absolutely - people do that all the time. However in the Route53 case there are a few automatic integrations that only work with other AWS services. Not that big a deal though.
- nisten 6y ago
- davidgerard 6y agoyeah, that's literally 4x the cost of my box at Hetzner mind you, it's very much a pet and not cattle
- tyingq 6y agoAlso, Lightsail is hot garbage. It has the same crazy aggressive throttles as a T2 instance. You'll have roughly 5% of the original CPU if you run hot for half an hour or so. It is not comparable at all to other cheap VPS options.
- csdreamer7 6y agoJust looked at contabo.com Am I reading this right? 4 cores, 8 gigs of ram, 200 gigs SSD for 4.99 euro a month? That is around $5.60 USD a month. That feels too cheap to be true. What's the catch over ec2 or Digital Ocean?
- corobo 6y agoAdmittedly I've only seen a couple of sources but it looks like their tactics are as old as their website design. Good old fashioned overselling.