7 ms·

Amazon EC2 Instance Comparison

152 points by beaucronin 14y ago

ben1040 14y ago
Nice. Would be extra useful to see reserved instance pricing on here too.
- pixelcort 14y ago
  ... and spot prices, too.
- wes-exp 14y ago
  This. I would like to see the amortized costs of running reserved instances 24/7 for their full reservation period.
- mthreat 14y ago
  Here ya go, dynamic too (jeffbarr, take note) - http://mikekhristo.com/ec2-ondemand-vs-reserved-instance-savings-calculator/ http://mikekhristo.com/ec2-ondemand-vs-reserved-instance-sav...
  - jeffbarr 14y ago
    That's really nice. Did you make it?
    - mthreat 14y ago
      I didn't - the author's name is on the page though. I use it so often, I almost keep it in a dedicated browser tab.
      - MrMike 14y ago
        Glad it's working out for you... let me know if you want any changes
  - thebluesky 14y ago
    Nice work!
- pella 14y ago
  another useful info for RAID0 is the disk strorage number: 2 disk: m2.4xlarge : 1680 GiB instance storage (2 x 840 GiB) 4 disk: c1.xlarge : 1680 GiB instance storage (4 x 420 GiB) more info: http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/instance-types.html?r=9869 http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/in... and a quick start: "RAID0 ephemeral storage on AWS EC2" http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2011/05/raid0-ephemeral-storage-on-aws-ec2.html http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2011/05/raid0-ephemeral-...
tszming 14y ago
Need to give a warning next to the t1.micro instance e.g. only for short bursts, extreme throttling afterward
- jlgreco 14y ago
  Micros are pretty fantastic for non-commercial use. If I'm testing some stuff out at home and need a couple different machines I can either fire up some VMs.. but I'm on a netbook.. or I can almost instantly just pull up a couple EC2 micro instances for the amount of money I find under the couch cushion next to me. I would never dream of trying to build anything meant to stick around and make me money on one though of course.
jeffbarr 14y ago
Here's a suggestion for a big improvement: Pick apart the EC2 pricing page ( http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/ http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/ ) and find the URLs to the JSON (e.g. http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/ri-light-linux.json http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/ri-light-linux.json ) and build something that's totally dynamic. Although the URLs and the formats aren't an official AWS API, I think it is pretty safe to count on them for an application like this.
- flyt 14y ago
  Dear person that works at Amazon Web Services: please just build this for the community. ec2instances.info is a much better resource than the existing pricing page and the calculator is entirely too much for many uses/discussions. thanks. edit: or copy this: http://mikekhristo.com/ec2-ondemand-vs-reserved-instance-savings-calculator/ http://mikekhristo.com/ec2-ondemand-vs-reserved-instance-sav...
  - MrMike 14y ago
    Or you can just ask me to make whatever changes you want...
- rehack 14y ago
  Hi! Since we get to know that you are from Amazon and listening, will tell you about another situation, which will help me a great deal. I don't think as of now, I can reserve a smaller configuration and if my need changes can just switch to a bigger reserved configuration. And the billing accommodates for the reserved price which I already paid for the smaller one. (As a real example, I have medium running all the time, but don't reserve it thinking I may have to move to a large one in the near future. ) Or can I already do this, and it is my bad that I have not noticed? If yes, then please point me to the information about that. If not, then can you take it as a feature request from me please.
  - rehack 14y ago
    Dear downvoter, I realized it was a bit off topic, that's why you sense a polite explanation in my first sentence itself. And I am not completely off topic, as its partly an interface issue. I am not 100% sure, if such a thing is not possible. Also BTW, if you have asked a question in EC2 forums, then you will know that the answer often is late enough such that, by the time its there you would have already solved your problem.
dcurtis 14y ago
This is awesome. I was starting some instances this morning, and it's shocking how poorly Amazon describes what they offer. I had three browser windows and a calculator open just to figure out which instances are being offered, and at which relative prices. You'd think they would spend more time on this stuff.
- jeffbarr 14y ago
  What can we do better? What don't we tell you that would help you to make a more informed decision?
  - dcurtis 14y ago
    I think it would make sense to merge the pricing and instance type sections (in a similar way to the linked page), and to also have all of that information in the new instance flow of the management console. It would also be great if you could show estimated monthly/weekly pricing for each instance type, with comparisons for reserved and on demand versions.
    - kika 14y ago
      I can't upvote more
    - jeffbarr 14y ago
      That's excellent feedback. I will make sure that the team is aware of it tomorrow morning.
      - pearle 14y ago
        I agree with the GP. I'm currently planning out a migration to EC2 for my company and having all this information in one place would be a great help.
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
  - 14y ago
jtchang 14y ago
I always tell people that EC2 generally costs more than a VPS. They don't believe me until they actually do the calculation. You have to factor in things like bandwidth and storage as well (which is usually included for services like linode or slicehost).
- zhoutong 14y ago
  Also have to consider the inferior CPU performance: 1 ECU is equivalent to 1.0 GHz - 1.2 GHz Xeon CPU in 2007. And the number of cores is usually small.
  - dasrecht 14y ago
    Basically this is true and this leads to the conclusion that instance types like (micro, small and medium) are quite underpowered compared to "today's" usage patterns right?
- cperciva 14y ago
  Remember that it's not fair to compare "VPS with 1 TB of free bandwidth" against "EC2 instance plus 1 TB of bandwidth" unless you're actually going to be using 1 TB of bandwidth.
- notatoad 14y ago
  My experience with ec2 is that you get significantly better performance for the price. An ec2 micro is possible to run a webapp with moderate traffic from, a comparably prices VPS migt have similar stated specs but they're all so oversold they can't really be used for anything worthwhile.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
bobbles 14y ago
Is there any information available about how popular each of these configurations is? (do they release that kind of info?)
moonboots 14y ago
There has been a lot of discussion on HN about dedicated hosting at Hetzner vs Amazon, and while they offer different pros and cons, Amazon appears to be a lot more expensive for comparable or even worse specs. Here's a comparison of two servers that have roughly comparable specs, Amazon High-Memory Double Extra Large and Hetzner ex8s: cpu: hetzner: Intel Xeon E3-1275 (4 physical cores) ec2: 4 virtual cores (13 "ecus" where each ecu is ~ 2007 xeon core) ram: hetzner: 32 GB ECC ec2: 34 GB (previous commenters have speculated that it's non-ecc because Amazon only mentions otherwise for compute units) disk: hetnzer: customizable, cheapest is 3TB disk or 120 GB SSD for 15 euros/month ec2: 850 GB (ephermeral) network: hetzner: 100 Mbit (incoming free, 10TB outgoing free, 7 euros/TB after) ec2: unknown speed (incoming free, $0.12/GB outgoing, $120/TB) price: hetzner: ~$265 for first month, $115 thereafter (includes setup fee, excludes VAT, after euro to usd conversion, includes cheapest hd option) ec2: $648/month There are a lot of other factors like the additional services amazon provides, failover, scaling, bandwidth quality, US ping times, reserved instance pricing, etc. It's not a straightforward comparison, but I would argue that for many users hetzner is the much faster and cheaper option. edit: formatting, spelling
- taligent 14y ago
  I thought it was well known that Amazon is very expensive compared to ANY dedicated hosting provider. But that's not the point of AWS. The point is that you get a PLATFORM as a service. Not just a box. You get an enterprise class queuing, workflow, load balancing, DNS etc all in the one place. Not to mention it's unrivalled auto scaling features.
  - moonboots 14y ago
    I think most people realize aws charges a premium for the ability to scale up and down, but at least for me, the magnitude of the price difference was nevertheless surprising. Some of the services Amazon offers will certainly be worth the premium for a subset of customers. However, the price difference makes other features like auto scaling moot because you can overprovision servers at Hetzner and still have a much lower price.
DrJ 14y ago
would it be a stretch to pull in Rackspace, and any other large EC2-like providers? I think having one of these tables as all in one during a meeting is going to get some managers to reconsider their positions.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
cbsmith 14y ago
Okay, how sad is it that there is this much excitement about what is effectively a basic spread sheet?
- jeffbarr 14y ago
  It sorts!
  - cbsmith 14y ago
    ...which you can do in a spreadsheet.
Uchikoma 14y ago
It would be nice to have monthly prices for 50%, 100% utilization to better compare with dedicated or shared hosting.
xxyyxyxyy 14y ago
I'd like to see this offered in CSV format so we could export to Excel or another spreadsheet program.
- webreac 14y ago
  Does this fit your needs ? wget -q -O - http://www.ec2instances.info/ http://www.ec2instances.info/ | perl -nl0e 'print "\n" if /<.tr>/;print "$1;" if /<td.>(.)<.td>/ or /<th.>(.)<.th>/'
jakejake 14y ago
I made a similar spreadsheet when I was trying to compare Amazon RDS with a dedicated server from Rackspace. It's a little tricky due to different services having different pricing methods - some of which based on the amount of bandwidth you use. But, this is my attempt to neutralize the differences to compare prices. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Avu9TF0Jdh2adHA5eVZPRHhJUFByUHoxUUlQY1NMSEE https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Avu9TF0Jdh2adHA...
ww520 14y ago
It would be very helpful to add two columns to include the reserved pricing (one year and three year ones).
crosh 14y ago
Has anyone done any cost benefit analyses of using EC2 versus a high performance provider such as Stome On Demand?
buholzer 14y ago
Finally! Some one did it, this is great!
ajain11 14y ago
A sheet I made long time back and takes into account reserved instances as well. Making it public for you guys to use it. It is just for us-east for now: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AhvNig7yndNZdExlRlVMM2h2VFFjbjA3VllwU3dIQkE#gid=0 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AhvNig7yndNZdEx...
UnoriginalGuy 14y ago
One issue I've had with EC2 is frankly the fact that you have less freedom. On either a VPS or a dedicated server you normally have complete control over the firewall (be-it either a hardware firewall or software). On EC2 you have no way of putting yourself in the DMZ, and the "Security Groups" only allow you to open up UDP or TCP forwarding. You cannot configure any other type of protocol/traffic and cannot bypass it entirely.

152 points by beaucronin 14y ago

ben1040 14y ago

Nice. Would be extra useful to see reserved instance pricing on here too.

pixelcort 14y ago
... and spot prices, too.
wes-exp 14y ago
This. I would like to see the amortized costs of running reserved instances 24/7 for their full reservation period.
mthreat 14y ago
Here ya go, dynamic too (jeffbarr, take note) - http://mikekhristo.com/ec2-ondemand-vs-reserved-instance-savings-calculator/ http://mikekhristo.com/ec2-ondemand-vs-reserved-instance-sav...
- jeffbarr 14y ago
  That's really nice. Did you make it?
  - mthreat 14y ago
    I didn't - the author's name is on the page though. I use it so often, I almost keep it in a dedicated browser tab.
    - MrMike 14y ago
      Glad it's working out for you... let me know if you want any changes
- thebluesky 14y ago
  Nice work!
pella 14y ago
another useful info for RAID0 is the disk strorage number: 2 disk: m2.4xlarge : 1680 GiB instance storage (2 x 840 GiB) 4 disk: c1.xlarge : 1680 GiB instance storage (4 x 420 GiB) more info: http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/instance-types.html?r=9869 http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/in... and a quick start: "RAID0 ephemeral storage on AWS EC2" http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2011/05/raid0-ephemeral-storage-on-aws-ec2.html http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2011/05/raid0-ephemeral-...

tszming 14y ago

Need to give a warning next to the t1.micro instance e.g. only for short bursts, extreme throttling afterward

jlgreco 14y ago
Micros are pretty fantastic for non-commercial use. If I'm testing some stuff out at home and need a couple different machines I can either fire up some VMs.. but I'm on a netbook.. or I can almost instantly just pull up a couple EC2 micro instances for the amount of money I find under the couch cushion next to me. I would never dream of trying to build anything meant to stick around and make me money on one though of course.

jeffbarr 14y ago

Here's a suggestion for a big improvement: Pick apart the EC2 pricing page ( http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/ http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/ ) and find the URLs to the JSON (e.g. http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/ri-light-linux.json http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/ri-light-linux.json ) and build something that's totally dynamic. Although the URLs and the formats aren't an official AWS API, I think it is pretty safe to count on them for an application like this.

flyt 14y ago
Dear person that works at Amazon Web Services: please just build this for the community. ec2instances.info is a much better resource than the existing pricing page and the calculator is entirely too much for many uses/discussions. thanks. edit: or copy this: http://mikekhristo.com/ec2-ondemand-vs-reserved-instance-savings-calculator/ http://mikekhristo.com/ec2-ondemand-vs-reserved-instance-sav...
- MrMike 14y ago
  Or you can just ask me to make whatever changes you want...
rehack 14y ago
Hi! Since we get to know that you are from Amazon and listening, will tell you about another situation, which will help me a great deal. I don't think as of now, I can reserve a smaller configuration and if my need changes can just switch to a bigger reserved configuration. And the billing accommodates for the reserved price which I already paid for the smaller one. (As a real example, I have medium running all the time, but don't reserve it thinking I may have to move to a large one in the near future. ) Or can I already do this, and it is my bad that I have not noticed? If yes, then please point me to the information about that. If not, then can you take it as a feature request from me please.
- rehack 14y ago
  Dear downvoter, I realized it was a bit off topic, that's why you sense a polite explanation in my first sentence itself. And I am not completely off topic, as its partly an interface issue. I am not 100% sure, if such a thing is not possible. Also BTW, if you have asked a question in EC2 forums, then you will know that the answer often is late enough such that, by the time its there you would have already solved your problem.

dcurtis 14y ago

This is awesome. I was starting some instances this morning, and it's shocking how poorly Amazon describes what they offer. I had three browser windows and a calculator open just to figure out which instances are being offered, and at which relative prices. You'd think they would spend more time on this stuff.

jeffbarr 14y ago
What can we do better? What don't we tell you that would help you to make a more informed decision?
- dcurtis 14y ago
  I think it would make sense to merge the pricing and instance type sections (in a similar way to the linked page), and to also have all of that information in the new instance flow of the management console. It would also be great if you could show estimated monthly/weekly pricing for each instance type, with comparisons for reserved and on demand versions.
  - kika 14y ago
    I can't upvote more
  - jeffbarr 14y ago
    That's excellent feedback. I will make sure that the team is aware of it tomorrow morning.
    - pearle 14y ago
      I agree with the GP. I'm currently planning out a migration to EC2 for my company and having all this information in one place would be a great help.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
- 14y ago

jtchang 14y ago

I always tell people that EC2 generally costs more than a VPS. They don't believe me until they actually do the calculation. You have to factor in things like bandwidth and storage as well (which is usually included for services like linode or slicehost).

zhoutong 14y ago
Also have to consider the inferior CPU performance: 1 ECU is equivalent to 1.0 GHz - 1.2 GHz Xeon CPU in 2007. And the number of cores is usually small.
- dasrecht 14y ago
  Basically this is true and this leads to the conclusion that instance types like (micro, small and medium) are quite underpowered compared to "today's" usage patterns right?
cperciva 14y ago
Remember that it's not fair to compare "VPS with 1 TB of free bandwidth" against "EC2 instance plus 1 TB of bandwidth" unless you're actually going to be using 1 TB of bandwidth.
notatoad 14y ago
My experience with ec2 is that you get significantly better performance for the price. An ec2 micro is possible to run a webapp with moderate traffic from, a comparably prices VPS migt have similar stated specs but they're all so oversold they can't really be used for anything worthwhile.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]

bobbles 14y ago

Is there any information available about how popular each of these configurations is? (do they release that kind of info?)

moonboots 14y ago

There has been a lot of discussion on HN about dedicated hosting at Hetzner vs Amazon, and while they offer different pros and cons, Amazon appears to be a lot more expensive for comparable or even worse specs. Here's a comparison of two servers that have roughly comparable specs, Amazon High-Memory Double Extra Large and Hetzner ex8s: cpu: hetzner: Intel Xeon E3-1275 (4 physical cores) ec2: 4 virtual cores (13 "ecus" where each ecu is ~ 2007 xeon core) ram: hetzner: 32 GB ECC ec2: 34 GB (previous commenters have speculated that it's non-ecc because Amazon only mentions otherwise for compute units) disk: hetnzer: customizable, cheapest is 3TB disk or 120 GB SSD for 15 euros/month ec2: 850 GB (ephermeral) network: hetzner: 100 Mbit (incoming free, 10TB outgoing free, 7 euros/TB after) ec2: unknown speed (incoming free, $0.12/GB outgoing, $120/TB) price: hetzner: ~$265 for first month, $115 thereafter (includes setup fee, excludes VAT, after euro to usd conversion, includes cheapest hd option) ec2: $648/month There are a lot of other factors like the additional services amazon provides, failover, scaling, bandwidth quality, US ping times, reserved instance pricing, etc. It's not a straightforward comparison, but I would argue that for many users hetzner is the much faster and cheaper option. edit: formatting, spelling

taligent 14y ago
I thought it was well known that Amazon is very expensive compared to ANY dedicated hosting provider. But that's not the point of AWS. The point is that you get a PLATFORM as a service. Not just a box. You get an enterprise class queuing, workflow, load balancing, DNS etc all in the one place. Not to mention it's unrivalled auto scaling features.
- moonboots 14y ago
  I think most people realize aws charges a premium for the ability to scale up and down, but at least for me, the magnitude of the price difference was nevertheless surprising. Some of the services Amazon offers will certainly be worth the premium for a subset of customers. However, the price difference makes other features like auto scaling moot because you can overprovision servers at Hetzner and still have a much lower price.

DrJ 14y ago

would it be a stretch to pull in Rackspace, and any other large EC2-like providers? I think having one of these tables as all in one during a meeting is going to get some managers to reconsider their positions.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

cbsmith 14y ago

Okay, how sad is it that there is this much excitement about what is effectively a basic spread sheet?

jeffbarr 14y ago
It sorts!
- cbsmith 14y ago
  ...which you can do in a spreadsheet.

Uchikoma 14y ago

It would be nice to have monthly prices for 50%, 100% utilization to better compare with dedicated or shared hosting.

xxyyxyxyy 14y ago

I'd like to see this offered in CSV format so we could export to Excel or another spreadsheet program.

webreac 14y ago
Does this fit your needs ? wget -q -O - http://www.ec2instances.info/ http://www.ec2instances.info/ | perl -nl0e 'print "\n" if /<.tr>/;print "$1;" if /<td.>(.)<.td>/ or /<th.>(.)<.th>/'

jakejake 14y ago

I made a similar spreadsheet when I was trying to compare Amazon RDS with a dedicated server from Rackspace. It's a little tricky due to different services having different pricing methods - some of which based on the amount of bandwidth you use. But, this is my attempt to neutralize the differences to compare prices. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Avu9TF0Jdh2adHA5eVZPRHhJUFByUHoxUUlQY1NMSEE https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Avu9TF0Jdh2adHA...

ww520 14y ago

It would be very helpful to add two columns to include the reserved pricing (one year and three year ones).

crosh 14y ago

Has anyone done any cost benefit analyses of using EC2 versus a high performance provider such as Stome On Demand?

buholzer 14y ago

Finally! Some one did it, this is great!

ajain11 14y ago

A sheet I made long time back and takes into account reserved instances as well. Making it public for you guys to use it. It is just for us-east for now: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AhvNig7yndNZdExlRlVMM2h2VFFjbjA3VllwU3dIQkE#gid=0 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AhvNig7yndNZdEx...

UnoriginalGuy 14y ago

One issue I've had with EC2 is frankly the fact that you have less freedom. On either a VPS or a dedicated server you normally have complete control over the firewall (be-it either a hardware firewall or software). On EC2 you have no way of putting yourself in the DMZ, and the "Security Groups" only allow you to open up UDP or TCP forwarding. You cannot configure any other type of protocol/traffic and cannot bypass it entirely.