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When these guys get within 25% +/- of dedicated hosting on price for what you get (specifically ram, bandwidth, processor), I'll switch immediately. They have a

by shingen 15y ago

When these guys get within 25% +/- of dedicated hosting on price for what you get (specifically ram, bandwidth, processor), I'll switch immediately. They have a long ways to go. Microsoft makes about as much in profit every 12 days as Amazon does in a year. I don't think Microsoft is overly worried about margin at this point. They have a huge incentive to keep the Windows Server environment competitive in the cloud game. They mention the only way Amazon will lose pricing power is if someone undercuts them in the cloud. I don't think that's accurate at all. Amazon is competing on the bottom side with dedicated hosting providers that give you twice as much for half the price plus bandwidth, and they're getting better constantly. I'd swear that Amazon taking some PR beating recently about how expensive their offerings are, was the primary reason for the EC2 drop. That comparison basis was mostly against dedicated and self/colo hosting.

deleted 15y ago
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e28eta 15y ago
I'm just guessing, but I'm not actually sure that Amazon is that worried about pricing against dedicated hosting. I think they provide a lot of added value on top of just ram, bandwidth and processor. Not everyone needs or wants it, but I don't think you should discount it.
- gtaylor 15y ago
  > I think they provide a lot of added value on top of just ram, bandwidth and processor Bingo. This is why we use them. EC2's performance is not great, and the pricing is only "good" if you reserve instances on a 3-year term. However, their full suite of services are wonderful. We're not really vendor locked in, either, because of how we designed our app. We're willing to pay a premium in order to not have to administer parts of our stack. For example, Simple Email Service is so cheap and beats the heck out of running a mail server. We have 0 media servers, because S3/CloudFront do it wonderfully. We don't need a front-facing proxy EC2 instance, because ELB works great for our purposes. Background tasks are scheduled with SQS, so we don't need RabbitMQ or ZeroMQ. Auto-scaling shapes our server fleet automagically to our traffic. Point of all of this is, you spend a ton more on salaries. We've been able to put off hiring because of Amazon's full suite of offerings, which is a huge win for us.
  - wootwoot 15y ago
    Eh, I run a one man shop, deliver on the order of 100k emails a day, and do most of what you describe on dedicated boxes (redis, queued jobs, mail server), and it doesn't take that much time to administer. My 4 servers have a combined 36 3 ghz xeon processor cores, 12 TB of bandwidth, ~80 GB of RAM, and 8 SSD drives totaling 800 GB of flash. They serve about 11 million requests per day from 100k unique users at an average of 30-40 ms per request. They do this for less than $3k/month, and I've got about 4x headroom from midday steady state. It's not as redundant as Amazon's setup, but I've also had less downtime than EC2 in the last two years. IO is consistent, and almost always below 10ms. Setup and teardown is a pain, but I almost never have to do it. I've been able to put off hiring because it's not really that hard due to how powerful servers are these days. I'll admit to using S3 for picture hosting, but that's the only one :-)
- shingen 15y ago
  I agree on the added value. Their offerings are incredible. I've used their Cloudfront at various times for example. If they get their prices down further, I'd love to make use of a lot more of their services.
tedivm 15y ago
>When these guys get within 25% +/- of dedicated hosting on price for what you get (specifically ram, bandwidth, processor), I'll switch immediately. They have a long ways to go. A "medium" instance is 3.75 GB of ram and 2 computer units (equivalent to one dual core processor). If you know you're going to use this constantly (24x7, or close to it- 8760 hours) then you can take advantage of the reserved instance pricing. At 8760 hours a year, $390 for the reserved pricing and $0.032 an hour you get a price for this server of $670.32 (or $55.86 a month). The downside is that this does not cover bandwidth. Most datacenters are willing to give you a decent chunk as part of the package (like 2000GB or something), knowing that most people won't use it. Even if you don't count that though Amazon is still a bit pricier- Softlayer sells bandwidth at 0.10/GB (in packs of 1000), while Amazon is at 0.12/GB for the first 10TB (after which it becomes cheaper at $0.08/GB). The point being, there are many situations in which Amazing is already cheaper- let alone within 25%. The new levels of reserved instances have really evened things out a bit.

by shingen 15y ago

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

e28eta 15y ago

I'm just guessing, but I'm not actually sure that Amazon is that worried about pricing against dedicated hosting. I think they provide a lot of added value on top of just ram, bandwidth and processor. Not everyone needs or wants it, but I don't think you should discount it.

gtaylor 15y ago
> I think they provide a lot of added value on top of just ram, bandwidth and processor Bingo. This is why we use them. EC2's performance is not great, and the pricing is only "good" if you reserve instances on a 3-year term. However, their full suite of services are wonderful. We're not really vendor locked in, either, because of how we designed our app. We're willing to pay a premium in order to not have to administer parts of our stack. For example, Simple Email Service is so cheap and beats the heck out of running a mail server. We have 0 media servers, because S3/CloudFront do it wonderfully. We don't need a front-facing proxy EC2 instance, because ELB works great for our purposes. Background tasks are scheduled with SQS, so we don't need RabbitMQ or ZeroMQ. Auto-scaling shapes our server fleet automagically to our traffic. Point of all of this is, you spend a ton more on salaries. We've been able to put off hiring because of Amazon's full suite of offerings, which is a huge win for us.
- wootwoot 15y ago
  Eh, I run a one man shop, deliver on the order of 100k emails a day, and do most of what you describe on dedicated boxes (redis, queued jobs, mail server), and it doesn't take that much time to administer. My 4 servers have a combined 36 3 ghz xeon processor cores, 12 TB of bandwidth, ~80 GB of RAM, and 8 SSD drives totaling 800 GB of flash. They serve about 11 million requests per day from 100k unique users at an average of 30-40 ms per request. They do this for less than $3k/month, and I've got about 4x headroom from midday steady state. It's not as redundant as Amazon's setup, but I've also had less downtime than EC2 in the last two years. IO is consistent, and almost always below 10ms. Setup and teardown is a pain, but I almost never have to do it. I've been able to put off hiring because it's not really that hard due to how powerful servers are these days. I'll admit to using S3 for picture hosting, but that's the only one :-)
shingen 15y ago
I agree on the added value. Their offerings are incredible. I've used their Cloudfront at various times for example. If they get their prices down further, I'd love to make use of a lot more of their services.

tedivm 15y ago

>When these guys get within 25% +/- of dedicated hosting on price for what you get (specifically ram, bandwidth, processor), I'll switch immediately. They have a long ways to go. A "medium" instance is 3.75 GB of ram and 2 computer units (equivalent to one dual core processor). If you know you're going to use this constantly (24x7, or close to it- 8760 hours) then you can take advantage of the reserved instance pricing. At 8760 hours a year, $390 for the reserved pricing and $0.032 an hour you get a price for this server of $670.32 (or $55.86 a month). The downside is that this does not cover bandwidth. Most datacenters are willing to give you a decent chunk as part of the package (like 2000GB or something), knowing that most people won't use it. Even if you don't count that though Amazon is still a bit pricier- Softlayer sells bandwidth at 0.10/GB (in packs of 1000), while Amazon is at 0.12/GB for the first 10TB (after which it becomes cheaper at $0.08/GB). The point being, there are many situations in which Amazing is already cheaper- let alone within 25%. The new levels of reserved instances have really evened things out a bit.