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I can (have) rack 2 x 1U top spec Dell servers (12 2.8ghz cores, 32gb mem, 4tb hd) with 3 year hardware warranties (next day), in separate locations with 1000mb
by xd 14y ago
I can (have) rack 2 x 1U top spec Dell servers (12 2.8ghz cores, 32gb mem, 4tb hd) with 3 year hardware warranties (next day), in separate locations with 1000mbps pipes at a grand cost of ~£200 a month over a 3 years period.
The equivalent with yourselves (max 8cores and 1tb hd) is well over £800 .. I've not spent much time looking into the advantages of cloud servers but can you at least give me a quick list of reasons you think your service is worth so much more?
I'm guessing the key is only spinning up what you need. Doing a quick calculation of peak times for my services, which is about 12 hours per day not including weekends the cost drops to about £300 per month. But this doesn't take into account the overhead of having to plan and implement something that can spin up resources when unexpected traffic hits.
I can see the value in your service for low value customers whose blogs suddenly hit the front page of HN or reddit for example .. but the cost of servers and rack space is so low I find it hard to justify the massive cost involved in cloud servers when you can just rack stupid amounts of computing power for such a low cost yourself.
- EwanToo 14y agoI think that's the standard question for cloud computing. Is your system: * Very consistent (no significant peaks or troughs of ~5x normal usage) * Has predictable growth * Comfortable with half of your capacity being down for x hours due to hardware failure If you can answer all of that with "Yes", then cloud computing (and even virtualisation) is probably not for you, you'll be paying a premium for something you don't want or need. But if you were to scale up your own application to have peaks that needed the capacity of 20 physical servers instead of 2, but with 18 of those same servers running idle 5 days a week, then the answer might start to look different.
- vilpponen 14y agoWell said, sir. The only thing I'd add is that few people/companies want to carry the risk of paying the fixed sum for 36 months. If this is not an issue, then your own equipment is definitely a better way to go.
- EwanToo 14y agoVery good to see a cloud provider agree with that, it seems a lot of them want to try and force the wrong workloads into their systems :)