8 ms·
Dropping Prices Again-- EC2, RDS, EMR and ElastiCache
- nikcub 15y agoDoes anybody have a history of AWS price decreases? I have seen a lot of startup internal docs where they compare the costs of AWS with colo, other cloud etc. and not one of them took into account the discounts that Amazon applies. Chances are that over 3-5 years you will see a number of price discounts - one of the only providers that does this for existing purchased infrastructure, keeping your costs in line with savings from Moore's law rather than locking in for years. I would like to know the complete discount history because there would be enough data points now to project estimated discounts forward
- rdl 15y agoIf you rent servers or buy colo from anyone else, you can ALWAYS renegotiate all prices based on a new level (if you've got a cage and want to expand to a floor, it becomes a negotiating point; you don't get stuck paying the higher price on that cage and a lower price on the floor. Until very recently, the only Amazon discounts I've ever heard of were the Reserved Instances (which really only makes sense once you're familiar with your needs). Inability to negotiate pricing is one of the main reasons a lot of consultants still go with non-Amazon options -- the client sees the list pricing for EC2 and knows what markup you're applying, vs. another option (or your own cage/suite/floor/facility) where you can consolidate all the charges.
- saurik 15y agoIn case anyone believes this comment (that "until recently" there have even no price drops), I will throw in an alternative anecdote (as I'm at a restaurant and am not interested anyway in digging up alternative evidence: readers can do that themselves), Amazon has decreased their prices for all kinds of things many times; bandwidth quite often, servers a few times... I actually find myself misquoting Amazon's prices in conversations often due to having lost track of random price drops. The one thing that hasn't dropped is where 99% of my costs are: the price of a PUT to S3.
- rdl 15y agoWe're talking about two different things -- price drops vs. discounts. They drop prices across the board all the time. They don't do individual negotiated prices at time T which are different for one customer vs. another customer. (they just started doing this a few months ago, in the form of offering special services to some customers but not others, and now in terms of volume pricing discounts). All hosting providers drop prices over time (mainly by increasing the amount of RAM per server at the same price, vs. dropping the pricing of packages) for some things (and tend to raise for power, cooling, and physical space). But everyone except Amazon usually also does individual negotiation of prices.
- nl 15y agoAmazon do negotiate individual prices in some circumstances. I'm not entirely sure what circumstances it takes to make them negotiate, but the discounts I've heard about are significant. It doesn't seem to be based on the size of the deal though.
- rdl 15y agoThe only times I've heard of this were GovCloud (which costs more, but includes a lot of extra service) and the recent announcement of volume based pricing (which is sort of individual in a way). Dropbox, Heroku, and Netflix would be the authoritative data points, I think. I've heard "won't do anything custom", but I never really pushed to find out about discounts. Even if they do exist, they're nowhere near as common as with every other provider (where either you get a marketing deal discount, or can just get a discount for the asking, especially early on, or as you grow).
- justincormack 15y agoIf consultants can't do business by adding a line item for their costs and have to mark up what you buy then don't hire them.
- rdl 15y agoThere are a lot of resellers of various services with different levels of value-add. The reality of the hosting business is that different providers give different levels of service, and in a lot of industries you do not want your customers to know your costs, so breaking it out as a separate line item isn't always optimal. Businesses actively try to avoid their product being viewed as a commodity. There are also purchasing people in big companies who are paid to negotiate down quotes. If you tell them there is only one price for EC2, and they can't get a 5% discount for a large order, they will in some cases have a perverse incentive to go to a more expensive (list price) provider who will give them a discount (so they appear to be doing their job), even if the total price ends up higher, or the service ends up worse. This is one of the many problems with enterprises. I'm not saying which model is better, but it's definitely a factor with some clients.
- ntoshev 15y agoI don't think there were price decreases of the hourly prices for EC2 instances - previous decreases were for traffic, or introducing reserved instances where you get lower price in exchange for commitment. I think trying to factor in future price decreases in an ec2 cost model doesn't make sense - it is too little and unpredictable to worry about. Don't forget that if you reserve an instance for 3 years and Amazon drops prices, you'd get only partial savings on the hourly fraction of the cost. Even as I use Amazon for hosting (instances running full time) I stay away from the 3 yrs reserved instances because I want to be able to reevaluate my options more frequently.
- saurik 15y agoThey definitely dropped hourly instance prices. They started at $0.10/hr for a small instance.
- wyred 15y agoProbably not for the Asia Pacific Singapore region. Few months ago, the on demand hourly price for a small instance is 0.085, now it's 0.09. There's definitely a significant decrease for reserved small instances. Edit: Reserved micro instances also went up.
- saurik 15y agoI am pretty certain that the price was 0.095, not 0.085.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- Uchikoma 15y agoBut did those "internal docs" take the increasing power of colo machines (or rent) into account? The colo you buy next year probably is more powerful than the one this year. If you take AWS price decreases into account, you'd need to take increasing power (and decreasing prices) for colo into account. Hetzner where I have servers increases the machine power (and sometimes decreases prices) every year. http://www.hetzner.de/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver-produktmatrix-ex http://www.hetzner.de/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver-produ...
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- wavephorm 15y agoI'm anxiously waiting for that moment where cloud storage becomes cheaper than buying a hard drive. Only at that point will consider I going all-cloud.
- ntoshev 15y agoGoogle Docs storage is $0.25 / GB * year. A random 1TB drive on Newegg was $0.17 / GB. Depending on you utilization and amortization schedule, it may be worth it.
- nknight 15y ago$170? That's a damned expensive 1TB HDD. Most are under $130, and that's still inflated due to Thailand. Also, 1TB hasn't been the sweet spot for a while. 2TB drives are coming in under $140 now, $0.07/GB.
- afterburner 15y ago3TB squeaking in just under that too, $0.65/GB: http://ncix.com/products/?sku=67447&vpn=WD30EZRS&manufacture=Western%20Digital%20WD http://ncix.com/products/?sku=67447&vpn=WD30EZRS&man... Before the Thailand floods, I was eyeing that drive for $130 ($0.04/GB) and thinking "can't go wrong waiting until I really need it." And obviously, comparing to cloud strictly on price, you can divide that cost by the number of years you expect to keep that drive... so then it likely drops to less than 1 cent per GB per year.
- sherbondy 15y ago*$0.065/GB
- rogerbinns 15y ago> $170? That's a damned expensive 1TB HDD. Google's price includes the electricity to run the disk, any enclosures, network connectivity, whatever CPU is needed to front end it, dealing with any warranty & maintenance issues, backups and backup media and who knows how many other items in addition to the bare metal. If you want to do an apples to apples price comparison then some of those factors should also be factored in to the NewEgg price!
- staunch 15y agoMust be kind of funny to look at their accounting reports. "Thanks everyone for your hard work this week. We're making substantially less money than last week. Let's keep it up people!"
- GigabyteCoin 15y agoAWS would be making no money if they cost more than everybody else.
- jurre 15y agoYou can either sell one can of soda for $5 profit or you can sell ten for $1 profit.
- batista 15y agoOr you can sell 1 for $1 profit, and lose $4 dollars over one sell at $5. Lower prices != more volume guaranteed, you have to find an equilibrium.
- JVirissimo 15y agoLuckily, most people that read accounting reports know the difference between revenue and profit.
- Duff 15y agoAWS is a shared service, so as they add more customers, the overhead costs of administering the service continue to drop. Their priority is to keep growth going at a steady clip. AWS is also a very granular service, so Amazon gets near real-time metrics re: usage, demand, etc for a variety of services. That allows them to analyze changes in usage patterns and correlate price signals to actual consumption of services. My guess is they adjust their pricing to control growth. Too cheap, and demand will spike, requiring Amazon to grow the environment too quickly. Too expensive, and they'll have trouble making the continuous capital investments that they need to make while still making money!
- zepolen 15y agoMost dedicated hosting solutions offer some bandwidth in their pricing and not a trivial amount either. 3TB a month is not uncommon which would cost an extra $350 a month on Amazon. If they want to compete vs dedicated hosts and it seems they are with all these price drops and reserved instances, they should take that into account, because right now they are just way too expensive.
- webjunkie 15y agoWe actually get 10 TB included... :)
- Uchikoma 15y agoHetzner also has 10TB per month.
- RKearney 15y agoYou get 100TB at 100tb.com... :)
- wildmXranat 15y agoI dropped my account with them because their network could never push data faster than a few MB/s. Just personal experience.
- toomuchtodo 15y agoBandwidth =! total data transfer
- dazzla 15y agoAmazon would only cost you an extra $350/month if you actually use that 3TB.
- guynamedloren 15y agoSlightly off topic, but... I launched a little web app about a year ago to play around with AWS and to take advantage of a free trial. It has grown organically with absolutely no marketing and even got covered by Lifehacker. It's a filesharing app for groups and is used heavily by the education sector. My free trial period expired a few months ago and I don't know if I can justify supporting the app. I've put it maybe 10 minutes of work since I launched it a year ago, and have not yet attempted to monetize. Anybody interested in taking this off my hands? Cash or something else? I'm open to ideas.
- nl 15y agoHow much traffic? You could try selling it on flippa.com
- itmag 15y agoOff-topic but relevant: does anyone have a good up-to-date tutorial on how to get started with cloud computing? Ie different alternatives, and pros/cons of each. And some info on how to get started doing common tasks.
- olalonde 15y agoCloud computing could mean a lot of things but there was recently an article on HN that did a pretty good job at describing the different types of hosting: http://blog.pinboard.in/2012/01/the_five_stages_of_hosting/ http://blog.pinboard.in/2012/01/the_five_stages_of_hosting/
- eddy_chan 15y agoI wrote a basic primer for django on EC2 to take advantage of the free tier last week here: http://eddychan.com/post/18484749431/minimum-viable-ops-deploying-your-first-django-app-to http://eddychan.com/post/18484749431/minimum-viable-ops-depl...
- mixmastamyk 15y agoThanks, I'll need this in a few weeks.
- bcbrown 15y agohttps://www.coursera.org/saas/class/index https://www.coursera.org/saas/class/index might be worth looking into.
- bonaldi 15y agoNot dropping the hourly rate for existing reserved instances leaves me feeling very short-changed.
- epi0Bauqu 15y agoYes, I feel like an idiot now for just buying a bunch of reserved instances. By my calculations if you just bought a reserved instance you'd actually save money by rebuying it if you plan to run it heavily over the three year period!
- cperciva 15y agoI've been holding off on buying reserved instances because it looked like they were overdue for a price cut. Even now I'm not sure if I should go ahead and buy -- sure, I'd save money compared to the current on-demand instance prices, but is the 2012 reserved pricing cheaper than the 2014 on-demand pricing will be? I really hope Amazon adds more transparency into the pricing so I can stop worrying about things like this.
- dazzla 15y agoI think your in luck. Looks like your existing reserved instances will see the savings as well. "This customer was in the process of switching to 3-year Heavy Utilization Reserved Instances (seeing most of their instances are running steady state) for a whopping savings of 55%. Now, with the new EC2 price drop we're announcing today, this customer will save another 37% on these Reserved Instances."
- bonaldi 15y agoI think that was carefully worded - note the "in the process of switching". The email sent to existing owners this morning says the new pricing will only apply to reserved instances purchased since March 6.
- ef4 15y agoCame here to say the same thing. I sent an annoyed message to customer service. It can't hurt, maybe they'll get enough complaints to change their minds.
- vilda 15y agoIt's fair to mention that maintenance of your infrastructure on AWS is far from negligible. This is not unique for private clouds. Especially given certain unpredictability in instance and EBS performance.
- Drbble 15y agoEBS is like the Matrix part III and Star Wars Episode I... It is best if you ignore the rumors that it exists.
- johnlauck 15y agoIf only mobile phone service providers followed the same path...
- verelo 15y agoSo i could just be dumb, but there is something about this pricing that doesn't make sense to me. All of this is based on micros in the Virginia region, and having them for 12 months. On demand for 12 months: $170 = (0.02 24 * 365) Spot instance for 12 months: $52.56 = (0.006 24 * 365) Light utilization - reserved for 1 year: $128 = (($0.012 24 * 365) + $23) Medium utilization - reserved for 1 year: $115.32 = (($0.007 24 * 365) + $54) Heavy utilization - reserved for 1 year: $105.80 = (($0.005 24 * 365) + $54) I get that the spot instance price may change, but it would likely always be lower than on demand and given that the others prices change, are they just the best option? So...maybe the marketing words are getting me confused, but i thought that heavy would be more expensive? Or is this telling me that i'm located with other heavy users, therefore i'm getting less and i pay less? Today we use a lot of micros, i'm starting to realize how much we could save if we switch...however whats a "better server" a heavy or a light?
- Judson 15y agoFrom Amazon: Light Utilization: "Light Utilization RIs offer the lowest upfront payment of all of the Reserved Instance types. Along with this low upfront payment, you’ll receive a significantly discounted hourly usage fee. Light Utilization RIs allow you to turn off your instance at any point and not pay the hourly fee." Medium Utilization: "Medium Utilization RIs are the exact same Reserved Instances that EC2 has offered for the last several years. They have a higher upfront payment than Light Utilization RIs, but a much lower hourly usage fee. Medium Utilization RIs allow you to turn off your instance at any point and not pay the hourly fee." Heavy Utilization: "With this RI, you pay a little higher upfront payment than Medium Utilization RIs, a significantly lower hourly usage fee, and you’re charged that lower hourly rate for every hour in the Reserved Instance term you purchase." Source: http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/reserved-instances/ http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/reserved-instances/
- verelo 15y agoYeah i get the pricing of light and heavy etc....but it doesnt actually state if they are different in performance or if its just a pricing thing? If its just a pricing thing, the difference between $23 - $54 to add an extra $15 / savings over a year seems reasonable to me...but if there was a performance hit i'd think again.
- akh 15y agoWe're almost done updating over 2,000 prices from AWS clouds: http://blog.shopforcloud.com/2012/03/were-updating-over-2000-prices-from-aws.html http://blog.shopforcloud.com/2012/03/were-updating-over-2000... You might prefer to use ShopForCloud.com to get cost estimates rather than use Excel spreadsheets. They have a lot prices to update, for example, EC2 has 7 clouds x 13 types of instances x at least 3 OS choices (Linux, Windows, Windows with SQL Server) x at least 4 purchase options (on-demand, light/medium/heavy-utilization reserved) => 1,092 individual prices! Just goes to show that they have pretty complicated pricing schemes.