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This is a very serious question as you clearly know what you're talking about from experience: how do you find it cheaper to run dedicated hardware? The reason

by mdasen 18y ago

This is a very serious question as you clearly know what you're talking about from experience: how do you find it cheaper to run dedicated hardware? The reason I ask is because I've priced out 4-core servers with 16GB of RAM at SoftLayer and ThePlanet and they come out to around $700/mo with 2 drives and RAID 1. Amazon charges $750 for an Extra-Large instance (15GB RAM). There is the potential that you don't want to delve into what you're paying for stuff too much, but it just seems like AWS is charging similar rates to ThePlanet and SoftLayer which are the two dedicated hosts that seem to have the most credibility in the community. Even if you were provisioning your own 1.7GB instances on a larger dedicated box, you would still only fit about 8 or 9 of them in 16GB of RAM (leaving room for Xen and such) which would make it the same price as AWS. The only thing I can see is that the included bandwidth could save some money. Maybe I'm not good at looking for dedicated server deals.

tdavis 18y ago
Well, there are a few considerations here (all of this is in reference to Softlayer, whom we use): - Depending on your storage requirements, 2 drives + RAID 1 (which is more of a convenience than anything and I almost never recommend getting) is often times more expensive than an iSCSI LUN which is far superior and offers zero-setup cross-country replication and snapshots (if we're going to pretend that RAID 1 is some kind of backup solution). - When ordering, if you choose the lowest clock speed CPUs, you're practically guaranteed to get the highest rated (more expensive ones) for free. This is either due to scarcity of low-end CPUs or Softlayer loves me. I have ordered numerous boxes from them and this has always been the case. - They always have "specials" which are usually pretty ridiculous. For instance, 16 of the 32GB of RAM we have was free, as in beer. Right now (and most of the time) they have free double RAM and HDD. Kiss the cost of one of those RAID drives away. - There are non-monetary considerations, such as support. Softlayer has without a doubt the best technical support I have ever been provided, and I've been through countless hosts in my tenure. We're talking about an Unmanaged host that has better techs than any Managed host I've come across. Not to mention conveniences such as automated OS reloads, private network, inter-DC OC3 backbones, VPN, secure backups, optional CDN, etc. (AWS has most of these afaik, minus VPN, but this goes to equivalence) - Your 4-core server, if you don't make use of deals, would likely be equivalent to AWS. Once you start getting into high core-counts, that changes fast. As a huge proponent of parallelization, many of the processes run for TicketStumbler make use of multiple CPUs; this means a lot of what we do is CPU-bound, thus the need for higher core counts. - 2TB of bandwidth is included; I also have no idea how this affects the cost overall. Edit: I added a couple TB of transfer to the AWS calculator, plus 80GB of storage: $854.10 per Extra Large. The difference in cost between this and our machine now amounts to nearly nothing. So, at the end of the day, the hardware we have is nearly identical in cost (within $100, IIRC) to the Extra Large Linux instance you reported, while having twice the number of CPU cores and twice the amount of RAM. We're also afforded all the other luxuries that come with the myriad services and support the conventional dedicated host provides. The dedicated hosting environment also allows me to setup and administer the hardware in the method I described in my previous reply; i.e., I don't have to setup a single Extra Large Instance (well, technically two) to handle a dozen different jobs. Hope this helps! Let me know if you have any other questions.
apinstein 18y ago
We've been running these numbers ourselves lately as well. We find AWS much more expensive. For instance, we bought a Dell 2950 / 2xQuad Core / 12 GB RAMB / 4x500GB RAID 5 w/hot spare for ~$4500. We have it in a colo where it costs about $150 a month for the space + bandwidth. This is about equivalent to the $750/mo extra-large instance. There will also be additional AWS fees for transfer, storage, etc, but we'll go with $750 for simplicity. That's a $600/mo premium, or $7200 a year. So I pay for the hardware within 8 months and after that it's $600 a month savings. There is a lot of value in being able to provision extra server quickly, use cloudfront, etc, but it comes with a high price, IMO.

by mdasen 18y ago

tdavis 18y ago

Well, there are a few considerations here (all of this is in reference to Softlayer, whom we use): - Depending on your storage requirements, 2 drives + RAID 1 (which is more of a convenience than anything and I almost never recommend getting) is often times more expensive than an iSCSI LUN which is far superior and offers zero-setup cross-country replication and snapshots (if we're going to pretend that RAID 1 is some kind of backup solution). - When ordering, if you choose the lowest clock speed CPUs, you're practically guaranteed to get the highest rated (more expensive ones) for free. This is either due to scarcity of low-end CPUs or Softlayer loves me. I have ordered numerous boxes from them and this has always been the case. - They always have "specials" which are usually pretty ridiculous. For instance, 16 of the 32GB of RAM we have was free, as in beer. Right now (and most of the time) they have free double RAM and HDD. Kiss the cost of one of those RAID drives away. - There are non-monetary considerations, such as support. Softlayer has without a doubt the best technical support I have ever been provided, and I've been through countless hosts in my tenure. We're talking about an Unmanaged host that has better techs than any Managed host I've come across. Not to mention conveniences such as automated OS reloads, private network, inter-DC OC3 backbones, VPN, secure backups, optional CDN, etc. (AWS has most of these afaik, minus VPN, but this goes to equivalence) - Your 4-core server, if you don't make use of deals, would likely be equivalent to AWS. Once you start getting into high core-counts, that changes fast. As a huge proponent of parallelization, many of the processes run for TicketStumbler make use of multiple CPUs; this means a lot of what we do is CPU-bound, thus the need for higher core counts. - 2TB of bandwidth is included; I also have no idea how this affects the cost overall. Edit: I added a couple TB of transfer to the AWS calculator, plus 80GB of storage: $854.10 per Extra Large. The difference in cost between this and our machine now amounts to nearly nothing. So, at the end of the day, the hardware we have is nearly identical in cost (within $100, IIRC) to the Extra Large Linux instance you reported, while having twice the number of CPU cores and twice the amount of RAM. We're also afforded all the other luxuries that come with the myriad services and support the conventional dedicated host provides. The dedicated hosting environment also allows me to setup and administer the hardware in the method I described in my previous reply; i.e., I don't have to setup a single Extra Large Instance (well, technically two) to handle a dozen different jobs. Hope this helps! Let me know if you have any other questions.

apinstein 18y ago

We've been running these numbers ourselves lately as well. We find AWS much more expensive. For instance, we bought a Dell 2950 / 2xQuad Core / 12 GB RAMB / 4x500GB RAID 5 w/hot spare for ~$4500. We have it in a colo where it costs about $150 a month for the space + bandwidth. This is about equivalent to the $750/mo extra-large instance. There will also be additional AWS fees for transfer, storage, etc, but we'll go with $750 for simplicity. That's a $600/mo premium, or $7200 a year. So I pay for the hardware within 8 months and after that it's $600 a month savings. There is a lot of value in being able to provision extra server quickly, use cloudfront, etc, but it comes with a high price, IMO.