19 ms·

Why I Dislike EC2

238 points by hkarthik 13y ago

ejdyksen 13y ago
You also lose one of EC2's only advantage: per hour billing. This isn't true. Reserved instances still use per hour billing, just at a discounted rate.
- ejdyksen 13y ago
  Also, I think the author is mixing up spot instances and on demand instances, which have vastly different pricing structures.
- nirvdrum 13y ago
  That's not entirely accurate either. If you buy a heavy reserved instance you have to pay for every hour, whether or not you use it, for the length of the reservation. So, it's technically still per-hour billing at a discounted rate, but you gain absolutely nothing by shutting down a machine.
  - acdha 13y ago
    What you described is not true, however, for light or medium reservations where shutting down a machine means you have no cost. The other key difference is that reservations apply to hours used, not specific instances, which means you can do things like buy heavy instances for your 100% utilization level and medium for the amount beyond that which you commonly but not always use.
    - nirvdrum 13y ago
      I made no claim otherwise about light or medium instances. I was merely pointing out that for many people Amazon is no longer a purely pay-per-hour or pay-for-what-you-use service. Many people overlook the wording change made for heavy reservations. The parent's refutation of the article isn't as cut and try as stated.
adrr 13y ago
People use EC2 not because of price but flexibility. A good example: When we launch a product and expect lots of traffic, i can quadruple my server count in a few minutes. Once the event is over with, i can spin them down. I can't do this with traditional hosting.
- jd007 13y ago
  I agree with that but things are getting better. Providers like Internap exists now which has "instantly provisioned" dedicated hardware and a hosting API (http://www.internap.com/agile/ http://www.internap.com/agile/). I personally have not had experience with them but from I can see it seems to be good.
  - j-kidd 13y ago
    The hybrid technology you mentioned came from Voxel, which was looking really good before the company was acquired by Internap. Now, it seems like the service has gone downhill: http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1213599 http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1213599
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- latch 13y ago
  OP. I tried to address that in the post. I'm not sure how to explain it differently. The only reason you need to spin up more instances to handle the load is because of how slow the machines are in the first place. That $750 you spend on 2x m3-xlarges could get you machines that can handle 4x the load (or more). Under normal conditions, you spend $750/m. Under peak, you'll spend $3000/month with EC2 but still $750/m with dedicated (plus it's less to manage). Also in the post is that for the scenario you're describing, having dedicated servers handle the base traffic and relying on spot instances for the spikes, is much more cost effective.
  - jd007 13y ago
    The main issue with the hybrid approach is devops cost. you will be basically dealing with two very different infrastructures, and building the ops for such a hybrid system could be costly (in money and time). Taking this into account, the money you save shrinks, In addition, a more complex system most likely has more parts to fail as well, so your total reliability might suffer somewhat as well. Another thing to take into account is inter-datacenter network reliability. I have personally ran a hybrid system (dedicated + EC2) before and suffered a routing issue. The upstream provider for the data center that my dedicated machines were in suffered a routing outage to EC2 US-East region (or at least to the AZs that my instances were in), and my EC2 web app servers could not connect to my DB for around 10 hours (during the day time too). If you have a hybrid system, during peak hours (where you have lots of EC2 spot instances serving traffic), networking issues could result in unexpected downtime. This is of course, in addition to the regular SLA downtime you get from either the dedicated provider or AWS, which is not an issue if you have everything hosted together, but could become an unavoidable problem if not.
imperialWicket 13y ago
These are appropriate considerations to have; and the concerns about performance are very well-founded. Nonetheless, the values I see in EC2 and AWS come in the API, role management, and the centralization of services. Being able to automate everything is outstanding (even if many of the APIs feel very young). Allowing anyone in the organization access to the management console with appropriate privileges is helpful, and something that I haven't seen available from other providers - at least not with the level of customization that AWS provides. Also, knowing that just about everything is handled in one place makes things easier logistically - it's small overhead, but managing DNS and CDN and Hosting all in the same interface is convenient. Hosting decisions must be made on a case by case basis; but it's wrong to avoid EC2 (and AWS) simply because you can get better performing servers elsewhere at a lower cost per time period.
dangrossman 13y ago
On top of paying 8x what it cost before/after I moved from/back to Softlayer, AWS services just didn't work right. EBS failed often. RDS, which runs on top of EBS, would fail often too. When an entire AZ failed, despite paying double the hourly rate for "Multi-AZ" instances that were supposed to automatically fail over to another zone, nothing failed over, it just failed. If I need on-demand instances these days, I'll do it at Linode. They bill to the day, so you don't need to commit to a month for temporary instances. It's not as scriptable, but it works and doesn't cost a fortune over renting hardware either. More often, I just get servers with more CPU cores and more RAM than I need so there's plenty of room to absorb spikes.
- jd007 13y ago
  AWS does per-hour billing, so you definitely do not have to commit to a month for on-demand instances.
  - dangrossman 13y ago
    I was attempting to point out that you don't need to use EC2 to get shorter than month-to-month billing these days.
    - jd007 13y ago
      OK I see. But then why not EC2 with per-hour billing?
      - kyrra 13y ago
        I would imagine for a lot of people, they don't need that type of granularity when spinning up and shutting down a server instance. Unless you have some automation to spin up new instances as load increases for short bursts, I could see people working on a schedule that is across a few days.
      - orthecreedence 13y ago
        Scaling up/down is usually for CPU-bound jobs. EC2 has a bad cost/CPU workload ratio when compared to a provider like Linode. You really have to bank on the hourly billing (as the article touched on) to make the cost it worthwhile.
duaneb 13y ago
You pay for convenience. Saying EC2 is slower is like noticing that you have to wait in line at the bank: yea it's slower than just stuffing cash under your mattress, but you don't have to worry about it being stolen, either.
- thejosh 13y ago
  Except that everytime you want to have access to your money you have to go to the bank and line up. Then randomly the bank won't work, all banks in the region will shut down randomly and you're stuck without money, and you need to pay rent but you can't. You are invested in certain banks in the region but sometime s it feels like the bank has noisy neighbours, and it takes a while to withdraw money.
  - gfodor 13y ago
    So what you're saying is the mattress is better or that the mattress is a false analogy? I'm happy to pay a premium to not have to worry about the countless things that AWS deals with. Whenever people complain about AWS having downtime I have to wonder how sure they are that their uptime track record would be better.
    - hkarthik 13y ago
      While you're waiting in line at the slow bank because that's the bank you've used for years, you're ignoring the bank across the street with no line, cheaper fees, and 80% of the same services you need and will use the most.
      - gfodor 13y ago
        I don't want 80% of the services and have to build or manage the other 20%. I want 100% of the services. An app I am running uses ec2, s3, sqs, ses, rds, swf, elb, elasticache, cloudfront, cloudwatch, route 53, and opsworks. Take any of those out and you give me a potential headache, time sink, or out-of-scope responsibility. It all just works and while I am sure I could save as much as 50% by going cheap and rolling it all myself, my time is valuable, I'd have worse uptime, and with proper reservation of resources my aws bills are, in relative terms, marginal.
karterk 13y ago
This article pretty much reflects my experience with EC2. EC2 makes it very easy way to get started with things when you're figuring stuff out and don't have a great deal of experience in managing servers and machines. You don't have to deal with RAID, power outages, etc. and can literally treat hardware like software. But once you get up and running, you will realize that this comes with a great cost. EC2 absolutely sucks in terms of raw performance. I also notice variation in performance of machines on different times of the day, and between machines. Amazon has done a great job at selling "the cloud", and I can see many CXOs buying into that. But the fact is, renting dedicated machines from a good provider isn't exactly that hard. They take care of a lot of things for you. EC2 is good if you have wildly varying amounts of traffic such that you need to really have that kind of elasticity in your infrastructure. However, for most businesses, especially web apps, that's not the case.
- beachstartup 13y ago
  operations is hard, let's go shopping!
- rscale 13y ago
  I was shocked when I learned that many EC2 users with highly variable traffic don't spin down during off-peak because sometimes Amazon has problems that prevent them from spinning their instances back up. I love the idea of their cloud services, but the reality is a decidedly less attractive beast.
  - jd007 13y ago
    Hmm I would like to hear more about these problems that prevent people from spinning up instances. Is it a frequently occurring problem or only happens rarely (e.g. when APIs are down). Also are they managing the instances themselves or using EC2's AutoScaling cluster? I run a dynamically scaling cluster on EC2 and have not run into the problems like you mentioned, so I would like to hear more about them if possible. Maybe they are spinning up and down too rapidly and exceeds the API rate limit? You'd have to have a bugged/bad provisioning system to accomplish that though...
Afforess 13y ago
I agree with the author, EC2 seems really expensive compared to other clouds. One of the comments suggested DigitalOcean, which has much better pricing, and you can do flexible by the hour pricing and it has a rest API to bring up/down servers. /shameless shill + happy DO customer https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing https://api.digitalocean.com/ https://api.digitalocean.com/
- nwh 13y ago
  As always, the coupon "SSDTWEET" will get you $10 of account credit on signup.
- gingerlime 13y ago
  I've had a rather spotty experience with DigitalOcean unfortunately. Some times you can't create instances, it just hangs there waiting forever. You can't replicate snapshots between regions. I click the button but nothing happens... I've also had an order of magnitude worse network bandwidth sending backups to S3, both in Amsterdam and NY. It's ok for a dev box or playing around, and it's definitely cheap, but I wouldn't trust any production servers on it. _Yet_. I do see they improve at a very impressive pace, with new features becoming available regularly, so things hopefully change for the better... It's still nowhere near being a match to AWS, or even Linode.
- tkw8 13y ago
  Whenever someone says $CLOUD costs less than EC2 it's always a very limited cloud with a small number of customers with a tiny fraction of a fraction of the features of AWS. It's never an Azure or a Rackspace.
chj 13y ago
Agreed on EC2 being expensive and slow.
hkmurakami 13y ago
from comments: op uses softlayer
krallin 13y ago
Programmatic access is a big thing, and is what makes EC2, GCE, Rackspace and friends, different from dedicated hosting. (In the case of AWS / GCE, global availability is something else). Using the Cloud isn't only about instant scaling and per hour billing. Those are useful features, but mostly for specific use cases. -- The Cloud it's about the ability to have software that controls the hardware. It's about being able to orchestrate automated failovers that provision new servers. It's about being able to have services that grow and shrink depending on usage. It's about being able to replace your app servers with data crunching servers at night and relaunch new app servers at day - all transparently. Of course, those are just a few examples, but the general idea is that programmatic access (APIs) is the big thing. The rest is secondary. --- Is is, however, true that this is not useful to everyone. On the topic of succeeding using the Cloud, it's indeed difficult. That's why companies are building cloud management tools to help users do this. Disclaimer: I work for one of these companies.
- vidarh 13y ago
  You can orchestrate automated failovers that provisions new servers even if you have dedicated servers to handle your base load. And the price difference with EC2 is so huge that you need really massive traffic spikes for it not to be cheaper to have a bunch of extra dedicated servers on standby. Nothing stops your from spinning up data crunching EC2 instances at night either, if you want to, and if it really is more cost-effective for you than having VM on your dedicated hardware. There's plenty of API's available if you want to run your own "private cloud" on those dedicated servers too. I never deploy outside VM's any more, even though I also mainly use dedicated servers. EC2 is cost effective if you truly have really short term (< 4-6 hours per day) batch processing needs. It continues to shock me how many people take the pain and cost of dealing with EC2 for more typical web app usage.
  - krallin 13y ago
    Switching load or transferring data between a remote DC (your dedicated servers) and AWS is not that easy when you start having large-scale infrastructure though. This is a great idea on paper - but running your baseline infrastructure at your dedicated provider and the rest on EC2 is definitely a challenging task. Not that it's impossible, but that's probably going to be extra work at the app level. --- Running OpenStack / CloudStack, or similar software on dedicated servers is indeed a relevant solution too, but this is an extra maintenance cost to bear in mind.
forrestthewoods 13y ago
The first letter in EC2 stands for elastic. If you aren't using EC2 for it's elasticity then you're probably doing it wrong. Kind of a no-brainer.
- Goladus 13y ago
  Agreed. And of course, the second letter stands for compute. If you find yourself using words like traffic instead of computation and discussing the finer points of the per-hour billing feature instead of how many CPU-hours of jobs are enqueued, you should definitely consider that you're trying to use a tool that wasn't designed with your needs in mind. That said, AWS in general has a lot of useful tools for web developers, and certainly one use-case of an elastic compute cloud is temporary development instances.
  - vacri 13y ago
    I'm interested to hear the next shoehorned criticism based on the third word, 'cloud'.
    - Goladus 13y ago
      You won't, because there does not appear to be a related chronic misunderstanding with that one.
- nirvdrum 13y ago
  Considering Amazon offers an entire pricing tier around 24/7 utilization (heavy reserved instances), it's probably safe to say that EC2 is no longer purely elastic.
  - twistedpair 13y ago
    It's called base load, a rather important concept in scaling to demand, much the same as the power industry.
alexvr 13y ago
You really can't beat it for the first year, though ;)
tikhon 13y ago
At Scribd we initially used EC2 for systems like converting uploaded documents to HTML5 (the capacity we needed varied a lot over short time spans due to things like variable API usage). Meanwhile, the app and web servers (and many others) lived at Softlayer (still the "best-looking horse at the glue factory" for managed hosting, IMHO).
bcoates 13y ago
I'm trying to figure out where this niche is that EC2 is more expensive than traditional hosting on a price/performance basis and I'm drawing a blank. Yes, they're vastly more expensive than the sticker price on a server (assuming you can size out your server needs years in advance), but most of the cost of running a realistic server are elsewhere, housing/power/cooling, NAS, networking, licences, manpower, spares, security, monitoring... The actual per-hour fees aren't really the top consideration for choosing among the alternatives and AWS is at least competitive on a TCO basis. The only things I get a big price/performance advantage over AWS for are things I might as well host on my desk, and even there it's dicey.
- nasalgoat 13y ago
  Just last week I ran the numbers on my current DC costs - hardware, cooling, space, network - versus EC2 and it was 60% more expensive per month for EC2. Quite a premium. Even adding in the salaries for my admin team only drop it a few more percentage points.
- dangrossman 13y ago
  EC2 is more expensive than renting dedicated hardware. Housing/power/cooling/networking/etc are all built-in to that price, not added costs. Colocating your own hardware is not the only option. You can provision someone else's dedicated hardware in under an hour, all costs included, with 24/7 on-site staff to handle failed components or other issues (which again are included in the price).
  - bcoates 13y ago
    I'm speccing out some things I host on AWS on softlayer's dedicated hosting, and I'm not coming up with vastly cheaper prices there either. I can get big (compared to ec2) servers cheap but storage costs eat up most of the advantage.
    - latch 13y ago
      Softlayer, along with Rackspace, are expensive providers. The price will be similar to EC2 (but the raw performance of the CPUs and hard disks will be much better). Hetzner and OVH provide the starkest contrast when it comes to price. They are also pretty well respected. There's a million other choices in between. webhostingtalk.com is the best place to get more info..but I can give you names that have been around for a long time and tend to be liked by customers: webnx, singlehop, 100tb (softlayer reseller), reliablesite.net, hivelocity, netdepot. The list goes on and on, but if you want to see price differences, check them out.
dk8996 13y ago
We use SoftLayer to run a few hundred nodes and they have issues as well. For example, their network sucks and they have high rate of hardware failure (sometimes hard drive failures are off the charts).
- chrisboulton 13y ago
  We're in the same boat. I definitely agree with you on the disk failures, and that's something I need to bring up with our account manager. The above said, the network has been solid for us at SoftLayer for the last 1 1/2 - 2 years (things were rocky for a little while before that as the client base outgrew their capacity). Of course, your systems might be in different data centers to us so mileage may differ.
tzury 13y ago
1. AWS beats all others when it comes to security [1]. 2. EC2 is just one item in the package called AWS. Hence, if you just build something more than just "web-app with *db" at the back-end, say a full blown platform, then I know no other option for you to get the full stack integrated API for Data-warehouse, DNS, Load-balancing, auto-scaling, billing, etc. 3. Speed is sometimes over-rated. You should be be speedy where it matters more. That is, how fast can you redeploy your entire cloud from scratch in case of a disaster should be more interesting to you than if a webpage takes 20 more ms to get to the browser. In our case, at AWS, it is a matter of < 20 minutes. 1: https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/ https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/ and https://aws.amazon.com/security/ https://aws.amazon.com/security/
- nasalgoat 13y ago
  20ms could mean the difference between a single digit rank in the App Store and a three digit rank. I see it every day - if my systems drop by 50ms average, I see a drop in rank. And 20ms? Try more like 300ms+ difference. Hell, sometimes a full second or more for some sites. Anyone who says total disaster recovery time is more important than total latency isn't running anything remotely to scale.
  - tzury 13y ago
    Are you globally distributed? Are you using CloudFront? Those are cheap services which improve speed dramatically.
    - nasalgoat 13y ago
      Yes and yes, we're using a CDN. Neither of those change that EC2 instances are slow and have unreliable performance, and the network is abstracted to the point where you can't effectively control packet flow.
      - tzury 13y ago
        EC2 will not become faster. However, at least, for web traffic, CPU and IO are not the only factors. Network is, in fact, a major player in the latency, and by being globally distributed, configuring Route53 appropriately, and integrating CloudFront CDN, a given web-app gets a boost that I doubt a faster computer can beat.
Vitaly 13y ago
Any argument involving price seems to completely ignore TCO. We are using Heroku for most of our needs and suggest it to all our clients and we couldn't be happier to pay the premium over "expensive" AWS. We save a lot on IT and maintenance. Unless you are paying thousands of dollars per month, or your time is very cheap doing your own servers will cost you more. If AWS were so expensive and "not worth it" what are the guys from Netflix smoking? ;) Also see this AWS cost analysis from TripAdvisor Technical Operations team: http://highscalability.com/blog/2012/10/2/an-epic-tripadvisor-update-why-not-run-on-the-cloud-the-gran.html http://highscalability.com/blog/2012/10/2/an-epic-tripadviso... "Combined cost for each datacenter is about $1.3M per year." ... "If we spent the $1.3M per year on a complete EC2 site instead, we could afford the following architecture, provided that we used one-year reserved instances." ... "This means that we could add more than 60% capacity our current configuration"
- nasalgoat 13y ago
  The guys at Netflix don't mind paying the premium to avoid the "overhead" of systems people. It's more a philosophical issue than a technical one. Also, they get preferred pricing and status at Amazon that normal people don't get.
- latch 13y ago
  We do spend thousands a month of hosting. We have servers in 5 geographies...If you include our CDN costs, the amount we spend is quite large. The money we save is enough to get a full time devops and then some. Netflix probably doesn't pay what you and I pay. Also, for every Netflix, you can find 100 examples that use dedicated or collocated.
- atto 13y ago
  I use AWS extensively, but to be completely fair, Netflix doesn't really care about operations costs. Yes, seriously. Their media licensing is so much more expensive, they do not optimize bang-for-buck, going as far as using larger instances (to avoid noisy neighbor problems) that are much less cost effective. So while AWS might be completely worth it for some people (it is for us), Netflix isn't the best argument :).
staunch 13y ago
+ You get very unpredictable server resources, which is why disk and network throughput can vary wildly. These issues are why we started Uptano, really just to scratch this itch for ourselves. Plug: https://uptano.com https://uptano.com The thing is, EC2 really was neat when it launched, but there are so many things that can be improved upon. Amazon has moved surprisingly slowly in improving EC2 itself.
pbiggar 13y ago
Is there anyone elastic that costs the same as EC2 but beats them on performance (CPU in particular, as well as more and faster RAM).
saosebastiao 13y ago
As someone who loves EC2 (and happens to work for Amazon, but in a different domain), I can't figure out why people/companies haven't moved towards Hybrid Clouds. There are several strengths and weaknesses of the various providers, and the reward-to-risk ratio of locking yourself into one platform is just too small to matter. There are several scenarios where I could see myself using a combination of Rackspace + EC2 + Linode + colocation. A little puppet/chef knowledge goes a long way.
- trotsky 13y ago
  I can't quite parse what you're saying about the reward to risk level being too low for lock in, but having worked with a number of startups that were 100% aws and paying dearly for it thge lock in was their major problem - ec2 ancillary private branded or unique services all seem to be designed with lock in being the number one goal. From what I've seen the first acknowledgment of lock in seems to open the flood gate, kind of a well if we're already "stuck" we might as well use this proprietary feature that will save us 10% in build time. Not the smartest approach, but no one accuses most web startups of being in the long game.
  - saosebastiao 13y ago
    I know of a few people that say that there are benefits to sticking to one platform...that there is less maintenance and lower friction from the "one stop shop" setups that you get on App Engine or Heroku or AWS. I'm just saying those benefits are tiny in comparison to the risks of lock in.
- acdha 13y ago
  The crazy part is that so far at the Amazon sales events I've attended the AWS staff frequently repeated the recommendation that you buy dedicated iron for your 24x7 workload and use EC2 for bursty jobs, usually pushing VPC as the way to tie everything together.
- admbk 13y ago
  Most organizations when they try to use AWS or Rackspace as a mere extension of their datacenter - discover that is quite hard, and that their apps require extensive redesign to fit the new environment. This in turn leads to the lock-in and lack of flexibility. I think this blog post touches on the phenomenon: http://www.ravellosystems.com/blog/the-unbearable-lightness-of-cloud-lock-in/ http://www.ravellosystems.com/blog/the-unbearable-lightness-...
mardix 13y ago
I've been using Singlehop.com for over three years, and I couldn't be any happier. I rented a dedicated server in which I can create and destroy as many VMs as I want. I didn't have to setup anything. Once I got the dynamic server everything was available for me. No sweat, no headache, same price every month.
tszming 13y ago
>> At our most expensive location, we get 64GB ECC RAM, 4x1TB RAID 10 (hardware), Dual E5-2620 and 4 1Gbps adapters (bonded, 2x public, 2x private) for around 60% the price of an M3-2XLarge. M3-2XLarge = $720 per month, 60% = $432 As a softlayer customer, I would be very surprised if you can get 2620/64GB/4TB disks at this price range, we also consider ourself not a small customer, but for the above config, I guess we need to pay $800+. (after discount)
- nasalgoat 13y ago
  Are you including the up-front payment required for reserved instances?
  - tszming 13y ago
    $720 is the on demand monthly price for m3.2xlarge.
- latch 13y ago
  we use 100tb.com, a sofltayer reseller. It's $359 + $50 since both DC and SG aren't official 100tb datacenters: http://www.100tb.com/server-deals/ http://www.100tb.com/server-deals/ We get access to Softlayer's vpn, their control panel..pretty much everything. Years ago, at a different company, we used Softlayer proper...you can negotiate prices down by huge amounts..even so, they are overpriced when you take into account their reseller. (Note, I know the deal says 48GB, but we have 10 or so of those servers, and they all came with 64...ssshhhh).
  - tszming 13y ago
    Thanks for the link. We have several 48GB machines ordered directly from SL, even after so called discount from SL's sales, we need to pay around $5xx per month.
- hexedpackets 13y ago
  $720/mo is solely for the instance. Add in the cost of traffic (Softlayer appears to give you 5TB, so let's use that) and you're up to $1463/mo.
adventured 13y ago
While clearly Amazon is working on bringing down the cost of EC2, as it is today you're paying a premium to get at the AWS ecosystem (and for some companies it's well worth it). There's no other great reason to choose EC2 for servers given the pricing. I understand why people keep writing about the cost, but if you have use for the myriad of AWS services, then good luck replicating what they offer on dedicated servers (without spending an equally huge sum, either in dollars or time or both).
- m0th87 13y ago
  If you're making a fairly standard webapp, what does it provide you that, e.g. softlayer or linode does not? How much of AWS' popularity come from it just being a safe choice, like a cloud version of "No One Ever Got Fired for Buying IBM"?
  - threeseed 13y ago
    Firstly AWS sets the benchmark for security, transparency and compliance which we know you won't get from Linode for example. Secondly AWS has a damn good network. Thirdly lots of software 'understands' EC2 e.g. Cassandra, Hazelcast. AWS' popularity comes not just from the wide array of decent, well integrated and cohesive services e.g. S3, SQS, ELB, ElastiCache but also all of the third party services that are hosted within the AWS network e.g. MongoHQ, IronMQ/IronIO. AWS is very much an ecosystem. If you are building a new app from scratch there a lot of benefits to having others manage the commodity parts of your infrastructure.
  - adventured 13y ago
    Well I think my point was exactly that: if you're building a fairly standard site / service / app, you absolutely do not have any practical reason to use AWS, particularly if you have a modest budget. The radical majority (99.999%?) of all sites on the web can easily be run by a cheap dedicated server. And I'm not talking Softlayer, which itself is expensive in the world of dedicated hosts; there are several better priced providers that are nearly as good as Softlayer. EC2 is never going to appeal to the bottom 99% of the web, until their prices come way down (and Amazon may never care about that). Dedicated hosts will keep offering more and more ooomph per dollar. The demands on a typical site in the US market (prime AWS customers currently) are not going up much per year at this point, as web usage is no longer growing much for the first world. Meanwhile hardware and bandwidth for an average dedicated server just keep getting better. Services that used to cost me $300 to $500 / month to run four or five years ago, I can now operate for 1/3 that price on even more powerful dedicated servers.
pbreit 13y ago
Is there something comparable to Hetzner in the US?
- latch 13y ago
  OVH has a datacenter in Quebec. We use OVH in France (OP, btw). It started off because 1 system needed SSDs, and Hetzner isn't great about SSD. Once we had 1 system there, it was easier to put them all there. Doing it again, I'd pick Hetzner over OVH. The OVH machines are great (weird disk partition though) and they've worked reliably..but the management console is horrible and while the support is fast and helpful, it tends to take a couple back and forth to get to a meaningful conclusion.
- eip 13y ago
  securedservers.com
brryant 13y ago
Sure, EC2 may not provide the best price/performance, but some of their new services are killer: Redshift makes Map/Reduce obsolete, and DynamoDB makes other NoSQL DBs weep with its scale/performance/flexibility. These services make it an easy decision to stick on AWS, and sadly ec2 as well
kmasters 13y ago
There are many use cases for which EC2 is exactly perfect and not overpriced. As a consultant recently I was tasked to build a service which (rather not say), I had good data on requests per day, total data storage, factored in ELB, etc. The cost was less than 2K a year. Now consider that the company refused to buy hardware or pay anyone to support it because they had a full staff of sysops maintaining their (rather not say) at great cost in their own data center. 2K is absolutely nothing to a company. Most of us are not Netflix or Dropbox. Don't pretend you have those kinds of problems if you don't. It could have cost 3x that per year and they still wouldn't have noticed it. AWS for manageable workloads is dirt cheap at scale. I think you'd have to be nuts not to use it.
Sami_Lehtinen 13y ago
EC2 incstance start times are also horrible. Something like minute would be acceptable.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
mitchi 13y ago
I really like the concept of Amazon EC2 but it's incredibly expensive and the performance is horrible. Give me a full 1 gigabits connection, a few ipv4 adresses, all ports open and I'm all good. 90 % of all businesses are okay with this. The server business is getting too centralized and it's bad for the internet.
dmourati 13y ago
I have done both building your own data center and running the whole enterprise on AWS. I like AWS better. Some folks have hinted at it here but the ability to spin up a node rapidly is a huge game changer. Ya, you could accomplish some of this with open source and your own hardware but the flexibility will pale in comparison to what you get from Amazon. A year ago, I was all on board the OpenStack train. I think it is great by way of keeping Amazon honest and therefore keeping prices in check. I'd still pay a premium for Amazon over a public OpenStack or a roll-your-own solution.
ilaksh 13y ago
Do the small ec2 instances have the same performance problems as the micros? I just told my boss the other day I wasnt comfortable usings micros in production. Surely the smalls perform better?
- latch 13y ago
  Yes they perform better. Benchmark it. But, if you plan on using a few instances that'll be on all the time, and none of the more advanced features....you'll get much better performance, for less, by using someone else. For small setups, Linode and DigitalOcean tend to be much loved (and Hetzner if latency to Europe isn't an issue).
  - ilaksh 13y ago
    Yeah I have some Linode, Rackspace and DigitalOcean servers, and yes they all seem to be a lot faster than the tiny EC2 instances. Never tried a small EC2 though.
- pjungwir 13y ago
  Micros are really a completely different class from smalls and larges, because they offer "burst" performance. You shouldn't run anything in production on a micro, unless it's non-critical and not public-facing. Perhaps a 100% static web site, although even that I'm not sure about.
  - davidbanham 13y ago
    They can be appropriate for production workloads. You just need to understand the consequences of that burst performance. You also need to understand that you'll hit the invisible CPU usage limit without any notice.
  - dk8996 13y ago
    You can actually run static web site from S3. Its really easy to setup, you can point your domain at a public S3 bucket. I put together this small website (http://www.de-encode.com/ http://www.de-encode.com/) to play around with it, seems to work well.
davidbanham 13y ago
Route53 is _nice_. ELBs are _nice_. Cloudwatch is _nice_. Security groups are _nice_. You can get similar stuff with most providers, but AWS is a better holistic package for my money.
lsh123 13y ago
I've run the numbers for our PCI-compliant setup about 1.5 years ago and Amazon was about 3-4x more expensive than the average bid for my RFP for several smaller hosting providers for a mix of dedicated and virtual servers. Another thing I've discovered with AWS (again, it was 1.5 years ago) is a horrible network latencies even inside the same data center on the same VPC: on a "normal" gigabit switch in a dedicated setup I would expect stable ping < 0.5msec with spikes to 1-2 msec on a loaded network. With Amazon, the pings were rarely below 10-20msec inside the same data center in the same VPC. It is easy to explain since Amazon probably doesn't allocate virtual servers "together" on the same router thus you have extra delays on going between multiple busy routers. In the same time it is pretty bad for many things (e.g. MySQL Galera Cluster that we use). So, my take on Amazon EC2: you want to use it when you are small (i.e. don't really care about performance) or when you are really big (when you can get "special" deal from Amazon and dedicate a lot of internal resources to make it work). In other cases a better option might be a mix of dedicated hardware (servers and networking stuff) and virtual servers at a managed hosting provider that would allow you to create the setup that works best for your project.
- dorfsmay 13y ago
  Network latency is very inconsistent on EC2. This is a huge issue is you use a piece of software that assume that you are in a data centre with good networking, as you'd expect in an regular data centre.
  - lsh123 13y ago
    It's not about "assuming" things. It's about severe performance degradation beyond any expected levels. Yes, there are solutions to workaround these things. But it will cost way more than a dedicated hardware setup if you account all the costs (software licenses, OPS salaries, etc).
    - lucian1900 13y ago
      Assumptions are certainly part of it. Software is often designed to consider certain round-trips cheap and others expensive. If this assumption does not apply, it will perform terribly.
Nux 13y ago
It's almost funny to notice so many people got so brainwashed with "the cloud" hype - especially AWS hype - they completely ignore the alternative and end up paying more for less. "But hey, we're elastic. Gigity!" :-)
jasonkester 13y ago
I sometimes feel like I'm the only one using EC2 as it was intended. S3stat's nightly job takes about 60 hours to run, and it needs to start and finish between 3am and 6am every morning. Amazon kindly keeps 20 machines ready to do that for me and only charges the time I'm actually using them. That's pretty amazing, and well worth the price in my mind. So yeah, if you need a box to run your webserver 24/7/365, you can find a better deal elsewhere. But that's really never been what EC2 is for. To continue the example, S3stat.com lives in a cage at a colo since, as the author points out, that's a much better deal than running it on EC2.
- TazeTSchnitzel 13y ago
  It's in the name, of course: Elastic Compute Cloud. If you need a static cloud, it's not for you.
- CodeFoo 13y ago
  > So yeah, if you need a box to run your webserver 24/7/365, you can find a better deal elsewhere. But that's really never been what EC2 is for. What Amazon offering is? This is AWS we're talking about. They have a service solution for nearly everything. You're saying in 2013 they still don't have a service for 24/7/365 website hosting?
  - nirvdrum 13y ago
    I know you were asking for effect, but of course they do and it's EC2. That's why they have a heavy reservation pricing tier, which only makes sense for 24/7/365 (you pay for hours even if you don't use them). But, it's fun to point at "elastic" and tell people they're "doing it wrong" because they don't take a name chosen 7 years ago literally. As if somehow the service (called EC2 virtually everywhere -- not Elastic Cloud Compute) could never evolve beyond that initial use case. Incidentally, the "elastic" in EBS must have a different meaning because one of its primary selling points is that it's persistent storage.
    - Goladus 13y ago
      In other words they took a system targeted especially at people who needed on-demand computing and as it got popular, adapted it to the needs of the 24/7/365 web-hosting by offering an alternate pricing model, point-and-click user interfaces and additional features and services like EBS and CloudWatch. The point is absolutely not that EC2 never evolved beyond its initial use case and isn't good at other things. The point is that while they have 24/7/365 hosting services, there's never been any reason to expect that they would be better at it than anyone else. So why do we continue to see blog posts about not liking EC2 with vague complaints about the horrible price-to-performance ratio getting lots of upvotes?
mva 13y ago
First, people seem to think EC2 saves you time and hassle. Compared to collocated servers, this is true. But compared to dedicated servers, managed or unmanaged, it simply isn't. Hardware fails? They'll replace it (at no cost). I totally disagree. OK, maybe it takes a bit more time to set everything up, but when you have it all up and running (AMI's, Autoscaling, etc.) you have a robust setup that can scale when you scale (up or down). Adding a new instance literally only takes some minutes. Try that with a dedicated setup. It's more expensive for sure, but comes with a lot of flexibility. What I see as an EC2 (or AWS in general) issue / challenge is that it's hard to switch providers. When you use S3, SQS, Cloudwatch, Elasticache, Cloudfront, DynamoDB, SES, Route53 your code is totally integrated / adapted to AWS. You can't take your code and deploy it on a different setup elsewhere.
- jaynate 13y ago
  In that case I would say you have architected an app for aws, then, and we should be careful not to do that for portability's sake. Http://www.12factor.net/backing-services
count 13y ago
How many folks saying EC2 is too expensive because there is a cheaper alternative are doing so on a Macbook of some kind?
stitchy 13y ago
I wish that the author had actually included a benchmark with nice pretty graphs. The list of example hardware is nice, but doesn't tell me nearly as much as a couple of benchmarks would. Blanket statements such as "EC2's price-to-performance ratio is horrible" don't really do much to convince me. Yeah, the author is probably correct. But to what extent is he correct?
JoeAltmaier 13y ago
Our interactive server-based app (TeamSpace) absolutely cannot run in AWS/EC2. The latency is the killer. Even when throughput is high, latency per message can be 100s of milliseconds in/out of a datacenter, which is on top of our app latency and our client latency, leading to a miserable experience.
Ihmahr 13y ago
What about the fact that it is run by a dirty coal generator? No one cares?
papsosouid 13y ago
I see these complaints a lot, and they are certainly accurate, but they miss the point. I use AWS because when an app server explodes, a new one is automatically spun up and added to the load balancer pool. The OS image is loaded from s3, which I don't have to worry about backing up. The app is loaded from s3, the templates are loaded from s3. I don't have to do anything. I would absolutely love to use dedicated hardware for the consistent performance. But where can I get dedicated hardware that lets me provision new servers automatically and have them running with our custom OS image in minutes?
clouddurden 13y ago
The amount of FUD in this article, and on this thread are amazing. The folks who claim it is more expensive to run AWS over on-premises infrastructure are either not counting their total costs (power, staff, off-site data storage, co-location) or not architecting things properly on AWS.
bifrost 13y ago
Lets take the m2.4xlarge reserved instance type, it costs somewhere around $2k/month on AWS, but with a "generic hosting provider" it costs about %10-15 of that. Don't forget the 5-20% virtualization performance penalty either. The tradeoff is that for $2k you can get it pretty quickly and shut it down whenever you want, but if you spend more than 80hrs a month with that in use you should really get a dedicated resource somewhere else...

238 points by hkarthik 13y ago

You also lose one of EC2's only advantage: per hour billing. This isn't true. Reserved instances still use per hour billing, just at a discounted rate.

ejdyksen 13y ago
Also, I think the author is mixing up spot instances and on demand instances, which have vastly different pricing structures.
nirvdrum 13y ago
That's not entirely accurate either. If you buy a heavy reserved instance you have to pay for every hour, whether or not you use it, for the length of the reservation. So, it's technically still per-hour billing at a discounted rate, but you gain absolutely nothing by shutting down a machine.
- acdha 13y ago
  What you described is not true, however, for light or medium reservations where shutting down a machine means you have no cost. The other key difference is that reservations apply to hours used, not specific instances, which means you can do things like buy heavy instances for your 100% utilization level and medium for the amount beyond that which you commonly but not always use.
  - nirvdrum 13y ago
    I made no claim otherwise about light or medium instances. I was merely pointing out that for many people Amazon is no longer a purely pay-per-hour or pay-for-what-you-use service. Many people overlook the wording change made for heavy reservations. The parent's refutation of the article isn't as cut and try as stated.

adrr 13y ago

People use EC2 not because of price but flexibility. A good example: When we launch a product and expect lots of traffic, i can quadruple my server count in a few minutes. Once the event is over with, i can spin them down. I can't do this with traditional hosting.

jd007 13y ago
I agree with that but things are getting better. Providers like Internap exists now which has "instantly provisioned" dedicated hardware and a hosting API (http://www.internap.com/agile/ http://www.internap.com/agile/). I personally have not had experience with them but from I can see it seems to be good.
- j-kidd 13y ago
  The hybrid technology you mentioned came from Voxel, which was looking really good before the company was acquired by Internap. Now, it seems like the service has gone downhill: http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1213599 http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1213599
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
latch 13y ago
OP. I tried to address that in the post. I'm not sure how to explain it differently. The only reason you need to spin up more instances to handle the load is because of how slow the machines are in the first place. That $750 you spend on 2x m3-xlarges could get you machines that can handle 4x the load (or more). Under normal conditions, you spend $750/m. Under peak, you'll spend $3000/month with EC2 but still $750/m with dedicated (plus it's less to manage). Also in the post is that for the scenario you're describing, having dedicated servers handle the base traffic and relying on spot instances for the spikes, is much more cost effective.
- jd007 13y ago
  The main issue with the hybrid approach is devops cost. you will be basically dealing with two very different infrastructures, and building the ops for such a hybrid system could be costly (in money and time). Taking this into account, the money you save shrinks, In addition, a more complex system most likely has more parts to fail as well, so your total reliability might suffer somewhat as well. Another thing to take into account is inter-datacenter network reliability. I have personally ran a hybrid system (dedicated + EC2) before and suffered a routing issue. The upstream provider for the data center that my dedicated machines were in suffered a routing outage to EC2 US-East region (or at least to the AZs that my instances were in), and my EC2 web app servers could not connect to my DB for around 10 hours (during the day time too). If you have a hybrid system, during peak hours (where you have lots of EC2 spot instances serving traffic), networking issues could result in unexpected downtime. This is of course, in addition to the regular SLA downtime you get from either the dedicated provider or AWS, which is not an issue if you have everything hosted together, but could become an unavoidable problem if not.

imperialWicket 13y ago

These are appropriate considerations to have; and the concerns about performance are very well-founded. Nonetheless, the values I see in EC2 and AWS come in the API, role management, and the centralization of services. Being able to automate everything is outstanding (even if many of the APIs feel very young). Allowing anyone in the organization access to the management console with appropriate privileges is helpful, and something that I haven't seen available from other providers - at least not with the level of customization that AWS provides. Also, knowing that just about everything is handled in one place makes things easier logistically - it's small overhead, but managing DNS and CDN and Hosting all in the same interface is convenient. Hosting decisions must be made on a case by case basis; but it's wrong to avoid EC2 (and AWS) simply because you can get better performing servers elsewhere at a lower cost per time period.

dangrossman 13y ago

On top of paying 8x what it cost before/after I moved from/back to Softlayer, AWS services just didn't work right. EBS failed often. RDS, which runs on top of EBS, would fail often too. When an entire AZ failed, despite paying double the hourly rate for "Multi-AZ" instances that were supposed to automatically fail over to another zone, nothing failed over, it just failed. If I need on-demand instances these days, I'll do it at Linode. They bill to the day, so you don't need to commit to a month for temporary instances. It's not as scriptable, but it works and doesn't cost a fortune over renting hardware either. More often, I just get servers with more CPU cores and more RAM than I need so there's plenty of room to absorb spikes.

jd007 13y ago
AWS does per-hour billing, so you definitely do not have to commit to a month for on-demand instances.
- dangrossman 13y ago
  I was attempting to point out that you don't need to use EC2 to get shorter than month-to-month billing these days.
  - jd007 13y ago
    OK I see. But then why not EC2 with per-hour billing?
    - kyrra 13y ago
      I would imagine for a lot of people, they don't need that type of granularity when spinning up and shutting down a server instance. Unless you have some automation to spin up new instances as load increases for short bursts, I could see people working on a schedule that is across a few days.
    - orthecreedence 13y ago
      Scaling up/down is usually for CPU-bound jobs. EC2 has a bad cost/CPU workload ratio when compared to a provider like Linode. You really have to bank on the hourly billing (as the article touched on) to make the cost it worthwhile.

duaneb 13y ago

You pay for convenience. Saying EC2 is slower is like noticing that you have to wait in line at the bank: yea it's slower than just stuffing cash under your mattress, but you don't have to worry about it being stolen, either.

thejosh 13y ago
Except that everytime you want to have access to your money you have to go to the bank and line up. Then randomly the bank won't work, all banks in the region will shut down randomly and you're stuck without money, and you need to pay rent but you can't. You are invested in certain banks in the region but sometime s it feels like the bank has noisy neighbours, and it takes a while to withdraw money.
- gfodor 13y ago
  So what you're saying is the mattress is better or that the mattress is a false analogy? I'm happy to pay a premium to not have to worry about the countless things that AWS deals with. Whenever people complain about AWS having downtime I have to wonder how sure they are that their uptime track record would be better.
  - hkarthik 13y ago
    While you're waiting in line at the slow bank because that's the bank you've used for years, you're ignoring the bank across the street with no line, cheaper fees, and 80% of the same services you need and will use the most.
    - gfodor 13y ago
      I don't want 80% of the services and have to build or manage the other 20%. I want 100% of the services. An app I am running uses ec2, s3, sqs, ses, rds, swf, elb, elasticache, cloudfront, cloudwatch, route 53, and opsworks. Take any of those out and you give me a potential headache, time sink, or out-of-scope responsibility. It all just works and while I am sure I could save as much as 50% by going cheap and rolling it all myself, my time is valuable, I'd have worse uptime, and with proper reservation of resources my aws bills are, in relative terms, marginal.

karterk 13y ago

This article pretty much reflects my experience with EC2. EC2 makes it very easy way to get started with things when you're figuring stuff out and don't have a great deal of experience in managing servers and machines. You don't have to deal with RAID, power outages, etc. and can literally treat hardware like software. But once you get up and running, you will realize that this comes with a great cost. EC2 absolutely sucks in terms of raw performance. I also notice variation in performance of machines on different times of the day, and between machines. Amazon has done a great job at selling "the cloud", and I can see many CXOs buying into that. But the fact is, renting dedicated machines from a good provider isn't exactly that hard. They take care of a lot of things for you. EC2 is good if you have wildly varying amounts of traffic such that you need to really have that kind of elasticity in your infrastructure. However, for most businesses, especially web apps, that's not the case.

beachstartup 13y ago
operations is hard, let's go shopping!
rscale 13y ago
I was shocked when I learned that many EC2 users with highly variable traffic don't spin down during off-peak because sometimes Amazon has problems that prevent them from spinning their instances back up. I love the idea of their cloud services, but the reality is a decidedly less attractive beast.
- jd007 13y ago
  Hmm I would like to hear more about these problems that prevent people from spinning up instances. Is it a frequently occurring problem or only happens rarely (e.g. when APIs are down). Also are they managing the instances themselves or using EC2's AutoScaling cluster? I run a dynamically scaling cluster on EC2 and have not run into the problems like you mentioned, so I would like to hear more about them if possible. Maybe they are spinning up and down too rapidly and exceeds the API rate limit? You'd have to have a bugged/bad provisioning system to accomplish that though...

Afforess 13y ago

I agree with the author, EC2 seems really expensive compared to other clouds. One of the comments suggested DigitalOcean, which has much better pricing, and you can do flexible by the hour pricing and it has a rest API to bring up/down servers. /shameless shill + happy DO customer https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing https://api.digitalocean.com/ https://api.digitalocean.com/

nwh 13y ago
As always, the coupon "SSDTWEET" will get you $10 of account credit on signup.
gingerlime 13y ago
I've had a rather spotty experience with DigitalOcean unfortunately. Some times you can't create instances, it just hangs there waiting forever. You can't replicate snapshots between regions. I click the button but nothing happens... I've also had an order of magnitude worse network bandwidth sending backups to S3, both in Amsterdam and NY. It's ok for a dev box or playing around, and it's definitely cheap, but I wouldn't trust any production servers on it. _Yet_. I do see they improve at a very impressive pace, with new features becoming available regularly, so things hopefully change for the better... It's still nowhere near being a match to AWS, or even Linode.
tkw8 13y ago
Whenever someone says $CLOUD costs less than EC2 it's always a very limited cloud with a small number of customers with a tiny fraction of a fraction of the features of AWS. It's never an Azure or a Rackspace.

chj 13y ago

Agreed on EC2 being expensive and slow.

hkmurakami 13y ago

from comments: op uses softlayer

krallin 13y ago

Programmatic access is a big thing, and is what makes EC2, GCE, Rackspace and friends, different from dedicated hosting. (In the case of AWS / GCE, global availability is something else). Using the Cloud isn't only about instant scaling and per hour billing. Those are useful features, but mostly for specific use cases. -- The Cloud it's about the ability to have software that controls the hardware. It's about being able to orchestrate automated failovers that provision new servers. It's about being able to have services that grow and shrink depending on usage. It's about being able to replace your app servers with data crunching servers at night and relaunch new app servers at day - all transparently. Of course, those are just a few examples, but the general idea is that programmatic access (APIs) is the big thing. The rest is secondary. --- Is is, however, true that this is not useful to everyone. On the topic of succeeding using the Cloud, it's indeed difficult. That's why companies are building cloud management tools to help users do this. Disclaimer: I work for one of these companies.

vidarh 13y ago
You can orchestrate automated failovers that provisions new servers even if you have dedicated servers to handle your base load. And the price difference with EC2 is so huge that you need really massive traffic spikes for it not to be cheaper to have a bunch of extra dedicated servers on standby. Nothing stops your from spinning up data crunching EC2 instances at night either, if you want to, and if it really is more cost-effective for you than having VM on your dedicated hardware. There's plenty of API's available if you want to run your own "private cloud" on those dedicated servers too. I never deploy outside VM's any more, even though I also mainly use dedicated servers. EC2 is cost effective if you truly have really short term (< 4-6 hours per day) batch processing needs. It continues to shock me how many people take the pain and cost of dealing with EC2 for more typical web app usage.
- krallin 13y ago
  Switching load or transferring data between a remote DC (your dedicated servers) and AWS is not that easy when you start having large-scale infrastructure though. This is a great idea on paper - but running your baseline infrastructure at your dedicated provider and the rest on EC2 is definitely a challenging task. Not that it's impossible, but that's probably going to be extra work at the app level. --- Running OpenStack / CloudStack, or similar software on dedicated servers is indeed a relevant solution too, but this is an extra maintenance cost to bear in mind.

forrestthewoods 13y ago

The first letter in EC2 stands for elastic. If you aren't using EC2 for it's elasticity then you're probably doing it wrong. Kind of a no-brainer.

Goladus 13y ago
Agreed. And of course, the second letter stands for compute. If you find yourself using words like traffic instead of computation and discussing the finer points of the per-hour billing feature instead of how many CPU-hours of jobs are enqueued, you should definitely consider that you're trying to use a tool that wasn't designed with your needs in mind. That said, AWS in general has a lot of useful tools for web developers, and certainly one use-case of an elastic compute cloud is temporary development instances.
- vacri 13y ago
  I'm interested to hear the next shoehorned criticism based on the third word, 'cloud'.
  - Goladus 13y ago
    You won't, because there does not appear to be a related chronic misunderstanding with that one.
nirvdrum 13y ago
Considering Amazon offers an entire pricing tier around 24/7 utilization (heavy reserved instances), it's probably safe to say that EC2 is no longer purely elastic.
- twistedpair 13y ago
  It's called base load, a rather important concept in scaling to demand, much the same as the power industry.

alexvr 13y ago

You really can't beat it for the first year, though ;)

tikhon 13y ago

At Scribd we initially used EC2 for systems like converting uploaded documents to HTML5 (the capacity we needed varied a lot over short time spans due to things like variable API usage). Meanwhile, the app and web servers (and many others) lived at Softlayer (still the "best-looking horse at the glue factory" for managed hosting, IMHO).

bcoates 13y ago

I'm trying to figure out where this niche is that EC2 is more expensive than traditional hosting on a price/performance basis and I'm drawing a blank. Yes, they're vastly more expensive than the sticker price on a server (assuming you can size out your server needs years in advance), but most of the cost of running a realistic server are elsewhere, housing/power/cooling, NAS, networking, licences, manpower, spares, security, monitoring... The actual per-hour fees aren't really the top consideration for choosing among the alternatives and AWS is at least competitive on a TCO basis. The only things I get a big price/performance advantage over AWS for are things I might as well host on my desk, and even there it's dicey.

nasalgoat 13y ago
Just last week I ran the numbers on my current DC costs - hardware, cooling, space, network - versus EC2 and it was 60% more expensive per month for EC2. Quite a premium. Even adding in the salaries for my admin team only drop it a few more percentage points.
dangrossman 13y ago
EC2 is more expensive than renting dedicated hardware. Housing/power/cooling/networking/etc are all built-in to that price, not added costs. Colocating your own hardware is not the only option. You can provision someone else's dedicated hardware in under an hour, all costs included, with 24/7 on-site staff to handle failed components or other issues (which again are included in the price).
- bcoates 13y ago
  I'm speccing out some things I host on AWS on softlayer's dedicated hosting, and I'm not coming up with vastly cheaper prices there either. I can get big (compared to ec2) servers cheap but storage costs eat up most of the advantage.
  - latch 13y ago
    Softlayer, along with Rackspace, are expensive providers. The price will be similar to EC2 (but the raw performance of the CPUs and hard disks will be much better). Hetzner and OVH provide the starkest contrast when it comes to price. They are also pretty well respected. There's a million other choices in between. webhostingtalk.com is the best place to get more info..but I can give you names that have been around for a long time and tend to be liked by customers: webnx, singlehop, 100tb (softlayer reseller), reliablesite.net, hivelocity, netdepot. The list goes on and on, but if you want to see price differences, check them out.

dk8996 13y ago

We use SoftLayer to run a few hundred nodes and they have issues as well. For example, their network sucks and they have high rate of hardware failure (sometimes hard drive failures are off the charts).

chrisboulton 13y ago
We're in the same boat. I definitely agree with you on the disk failures, and that's something I need to bring up with our account manager. The above said, the network has been solid for us at SoftLayer for the last 1 1/2 - 2 years (things were rocky for a little while before that as the client base outgrew their capacity). Of course, your systems might be in different data centers to us so mileage may differ.

tzury 13y ago

1. AWS beats all others when it comes to security [1]. 2. EC2 is just one item in the package called AWS. Hence, if you just build something more than just "web-app with *db" at the back-end, say a full blown platform, then I know no other option for you to get the full stack integrated API for Data-warehouse, DNS, Load-balancing, auto-scaling, billing, etc. 3. Speed is sometimes over-rated. You should be be speedy where it matters more. That is, how fast can you redeploy your entire cloud from scratch in case of a disaster should be more interesting to you than if a webpage takes 20 more ms to get to the browser. In our case, at AWS, it is a matter of < 20 minutes. 1: https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/ https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/ and https://aws.amazon.com/security/ https://aws.amazon.com/security/

nasalgoat 13y ago
20ms could mean the difference between a single digit rank in the App Store and a three digit rank. I see it every day - if my systems drop by 50ms average, I see a drop in rank. And 20ms? Try more like 300ms+ difference. Hell, sometimes a full second or more for some sites. Anyone who says total disaster recovery time is more important than total latency isn't running anything remotely to scale.
- tzury 13y ago
  Are you globally distributed? Are you using CloudFront? Those are cheap services which improve speed dramatically.
  - nasalgoat 13y ago
    Yes and yes, we're using a CDN. Neither of those change that EC2 instances are slow and have unreliable performance, and the network is abstracted to the point where you can't effectively control packet flow.
    - tzury 13y ago
      EC2 will not become faster. However, at least, for web traffic, CPU and IO are not the only factors. Network is, in fact, a major player in the latency, and by being globally distributed, configuring Route53 appropriately, and integrating CloudFront CDN, a given web-app gets a boost that I doubt a faster computer can beat.

Vitaly 13y ago

Any argument involving price seems to completely ignore TCO. We are using Heroku for most of our needs and suggest it to all our clients and we couldn't be happier to pay the premium over "expensive" AWS. We save a lot on IT and maintenance. Unless you are paying thousands of dollars per month, or your time is very cheap doing your own servers will cost you more. If AWS were so expensive and "not worth it" what are the guys from Netflix smoking? ;) Also see this AWS cost analysis from TripAdvisor Technical Operations team: http://highscalability.com/blog/2012/10/2/an-epic-tripadvisor-update-why-not-run-on-the-cloud-the-gran.html http://highscalability.com/blog/2012/10/2/an-epic-tripadviso... "Combined cost for each datacenter is about $1.3M per year." ... "If we spent the $1.3M per year on a complete EC2 site instead, we could afford the following architecture, provided that we used one-year reserved instances." ... "This means that we could add more than 60% capacity our current configuration"

nasalgoat 13y ago
The guys at Netflix don't mind paying the premium to avoid the "overhead" of systems people. It's more a philosophical issue than a technical one. Also, they get preferred pricing and status at Amazon that normal people don't get.
latch 13y ago
We do spend thousands a month of hosting. We have servers in 5 geographies...If you include our CDN costs, the amount we spend is quite large. The money we save is enough to get a full time devops and then some. Netflix probably doesn't pay what you and I pay. Also, for every Netflix, you can find 100 examples that use dedicated or collocated.
atto 13y ago
I use AWS extensively, but to be completely fair, Netflix doesn't really care about operations costs. Yes, seriously. Their media licensing is so much more expensive, they do not optimize bang-for-buck, going as far as using larger instances (to avoid noisy neighbor problems) that are much less cost effective. So while AWS might be completely worth it for some people (it is for us), Netflix isn't the best argument :).

staunch 13y ago

+ You get very unpredictable server resources, which is why disk and network throughput can vary wildly. These issues are why we started Uptano, really just to scratch this itch for ourselves. Plug: https://uptano.com https://uptano.com The thing is, EC2 really was neat when it launched, but there are so many things that can be improved upon. Amazon has moved surprisingly slowly in improving EC2 itself.

pbiggar 13y ago

Is there anyone elastic that costs the same as EC2 but beats them on performance (CPU in particular, as well as more and faster RAM).

saosebastiao 13y ago

As someone who loves EC2 (and happens to work for Amazon, but in a different domain), I can't figure out why people/companies haven't moved towards Hybrid Clouds. There are several strengths and weaknesses of the various providers, and the reward-to-risk ratio of locking yourself into one platform is just too small to matter. There are several scenarios where I could see myself using a combination of Rackspace + EC2 + Linode + colocation. A little puppet/chef knowledge goes a long way.

trotsky 13y ago
I can't quite parse what you're saying about the reward to risk level being too low for lock in, but having worked with a number of startups that were 100% aws and paying dearly for it thge lock in was their major problem - ec2 ancillary private branded or unique services all seem to be designed with lock in being the number one goal. From what I've seen the first acknowledgment of lock in seems to open the flood gate, kind of a well if we're already "stuck" we might as well use this proprietary feature that will save us 10% in build time. Not the smartest approach, but no one accuses most web startups of being in the long game.
- saosebastiao 13y ago
  I know of a few people that say that there are benefits to sticking to one platform...that there is less maintenance and lower friction from the "one stop shop" setups that you get on App Engine or Heroku or AWS. I'm just saying those benefits are tiny in comparison to the risks of lock in.
acdha 13y ago
The crazy part is that so far at the Amazon sales events I've attended the AWS staff frequently repeated the recommendation that you buy dedicated iron for your 24x7 workload and use EC2 for bursty jobs, usually pushing VPC as the way to tie everything together.
admbk 13y ago
Most organizations when they try to use AWS or Rackspace as a mere extension of their datacenter - discover that is quite hard, and that their apps require extensive redesign to fit the new environment. This in turn leads to the lock-in and lack of flexibility. I think this blog post touches on the phenomenon: http://www.ravellosystems.com/blog/the-unbearable-lightness-of-cloud-lock-in/ http://www.ravellosystems.com/blog/the-unbearable-lightness-...

mardix 13y ago

I've been using Singlehop.com for over three years, and I couldn't be any happier. I rented a dedicated server in which I can create and destroy as many VMs as I want. I didn't have to setup anything. Once I got the dynamic server everything was available for me. No sweat, no headache, same price every month.

tszming 13y ago

>> At our most expensive location, we get 64GB ECC RAM, 4x1TB RAID 10 (hardware), Dual E5-2620 and 4 1Gbps adapters (bonded, 2x public, 2x private) for around 60% the price of an M3-2XLarge. M3-2XLarge = $720 per month, 60% = $432 As a softlayer customer, I would be very surprised if you can get 2620/64GB/4TB disks at this price range, we also consider ourself not a small customer, but for the above config, I guess we need to pay $800+. (after discount)

nasalgoat 13y ago
Are you including the up-front payment required for reserved instances?
- tszming 13y ago
  $720 is the on demand monthly price for m3.2xlarge.
latch 13y ago
we use 100tb.com, a sofltayer reseller. It's $359 + $50 since both DC and SG aren't official 100tb datacenters: http://www.100tb.com/server-deals/ http://www.100tb.com/server-deals/ We get access to Softlayer's vpn, their control panel..pretty much everything. Years ago, at a different company, we used Softlayer proper...you can negotiate prices down by huge amounts..even so, they are overpriced when you take into account their reseller. (Note, I know the deal says 48GB, but we have 10 or so of those servers, and they all came with 64...ssshhhh).
- tszming 13y ago
  Thanks for the link. We have several 48GB machines ordered directly from SL, even after so called discount from SL's sales, we need to pay around $5xx per month.
hexedpackets 13y ago
$720/mo is solely for the instance. Add in the cost of traffic (Softlayer appears to give you 5TB, so let's use that) and you're up to $1463/mo.

adventured 13y ago

While clearly Amazon is working on bringing down the cost of EC2, as it is today you're paying a premium to get at the AWS ecosystem (and for some companies it's well worth it). There's no other great reason to choose EC2 for servers given the pricing. I understand why people keep writing about the cost, but if you have use for the myriad of AWS services, then good luck replicating what they offer on dedicated servers (without spending an equally huge sum, either in dollars or time or both).

m0th87 13y ago
If you're making a fairly standard webapp, what does it provide you that, e.g. softlayer or linode does not? How much of AWS' popularity come from it just being a safe choice, like a cloud version of "No One Ever Got Fired for Buying IBM"?
- threeseed 13y ago
  Firstly AWS sets the benchmark for security, transparency and compliance which we know you won't get from Linode for example. Secondly AWS has a damn good network. Thirdly lots of software 'understands' EC2 e.g. Cassandra, Hazelcast. AWS' popularity comes not just from the wide array of decent, well integrated and cohesive services e.g. S3, SQS, ELB, ElastiCache but also all of the third party services that are hosted within the AWS network e.g. MongoHQ, IronMQ/IronIO. AWS is very much an ecosystem. If you are building a new app from scratch there a lot of benefits to having others manage the commodity parts of your infrastructure.
- adventured 13y ago
  Well I think my point was exactly that: if you're building a fairly standard site / service / app, you absolutely do not have any practical reason to use AWS, particularly if you have a modest budget. The radical majority (99.999%?) of all sites on the web can easily be run by a cheap dedicated server. And I'm not talking Softlayer, which itself is expensive in the world of dedicated hosts; there are several better priced providers that are nearly as good as Softlayer. EC2 is never going to appeal to the bottom 99% of the web, until their prices come way down (and Amazon may never care about that). Dedicated hosts will keep offering more and more ooomph per dollar. The demands on a typical site in the US market (prime AWS customers currently) are not going up much per year at this point, as web usage is no longer growing much for the first world. Meanwhile hardware and bandwidth for an average dedicated server just keep getting better. Services that used to cost me $300 to $500 / month to run four or five years ago, I can now operate for 1/3 that price on even more powerful dedicated servers.

pbreit 13y ago

Is there something comparable to Hetzner in the US?

latch 13y ago
OVH has a datacenter in Quebec. We use OVH in France (OP, btw). It started off because 1 system needed SSDs, and Hetzner isn't great about SSD. Once we had 1 system there, it was easier to put them all there. Doing it again, I'd pick Hetzner over OVH. The OVH machines are great (weird disk partition though) and they've worked reliably..but the management console is horrible and while the support is fast and helpful, it tends to take a couple back and forth to get to a meaningful conclusion.
eip 13y ago
securedservers.com

brryant 13y ago

Sure, EC2 may not provide the best price/performance, but some of their new services are killer: Redshift makes Map/Reduce obsolete, and DynamoDB makes other NoSQL DBs weep with its scale/performance/flexibility. These services make it an easy decision to stick on AWS, and sadly ec2 as well

kmasters 13y ago

There are many use cases for which EC2 is exactly perfect and not overpriced. As a consultant recently I was tasked to build a service which (rather not say), I had good data on requests per day, total data storage, factored in ELB, etc. The cost was less than 2K a year. Now consider that the company refused to buy hardware or pay anyone to support it because they had a full staff of sysops maintaining their (rather not say) at great cost in their own data center. 2K is absolutely nothing to a company. Most of us are not Netflix or Dropbox. Don't pretend you have those kinds of problems if you don't. It could have cost 3x that per year and they still wouldn't have noticed it. AWS for manageable workloads is dirt cheap at scale. I think you'd have to be nuts not to use it.

Sami_Lehtinen 13y ago

EC2 incstance start times are also horrible. Something like minute would be acceptable.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

mitchi 13y ago

I really like the concept of Amazon EC2 but it's incredibly expensive and the performance is horrible. Give me a full 1 gigabits connection, a few ipv4 adresses, all ports open and I'm all good. 90 % of all businesses are okay with this. The server business is getting too centralized and it's bad for the internet.

dmourati 13y ago

I have done both building your own data center and running the whole enterprise on AWS. I like AWS better. Some folks have hinted at it here but the ability to spin up a node rapidly is a huge game changer. Ya, you could accomplish some of this with open source and your own hardware but the flexibility will pale in comparison to what you get from Amazon. A year ago, I was all on board the OpenStack train. I think it is great by way of keeping Amazon honest and therefore keeping prices in check. I'd still pay a premium for Amazon over a public OpenStack or a roll-your-own solution.

ilaksh 13y ago

Do the small ec2 instances have the same performance problems as the micros? I just told my boss the other day I wasnt comfortable usings micros in production. Surely the smalls perform better?

latch 13y ago
Yes they perform better. Benchmark it. But, if you plan on using a few instances that'll be on all the time, and none of the more advanced features....you'll get much better performance, for less, by using someone else. For small setups, Linode and DigitalOcean tend to be much loved (and Hetzner if latency to Europe isn't an issue).
- ilaksh 13y ago
  Yeah I have some Linode, Rackspace and DigitalOcean servers, and yes they all seem to be a lot faster than the tiny EC2 instances. Never tried a small EC2 though.
pjungwir 13y ago
Micros are really a completely different class from smalls and larges, because they offer "burst" performance. You shouldn't run anything in production on a micro, unless it's non-critical and not public-facing. Perhaps a 100% static web site, although even that I'm not sure about.
- davidbanham 13y ago
  They can be appropriate for production workloads. You just need to understand the consequences of that burst performance. You also need to understand that you'll hit the invisible CPU usage limit without any notice.
- dk8996 13y ago
  You can actually run static web site from S3. Its really easy to setup, you can point your domain at a public S3 bucket. I put together this small website (http://www.de-encode.com/ http://www.de-encode.com/) to play around with it, seems to work well.

davidbanham 13y ago

Route53 is _nice_. ELBs are _nice_. Cloudwatch is _nice_. Security groups are _nice_. You can get similar stuff with most providers, but AWS is a better holistic package for my money.

lsh123 13y ago

I've run the numbers for our PCI-compliant setup about 1.5 years ago and Amazon was about 3-4x more expensive than the average bid for my RFP for several smaller hosting providers for a mix of dedicated and virtual servers. Another thing I've discovered with AWS (again, it was 1.5 years ago) is a horrible network latencies even inside the same data center on the same VPC: on a "normal" gigabit switch in a dedicated setup I would expect stable ping < 0.5msec with spikes to 1-2 msec on a loaded network. With Amazon, the pings were rarely below 10-20msec inside the same data center in the same VPC. It is easy to explain since Amazon probably doesn't allocate virtual servers "together" on the same router thus you have extra delays on going between multiple busy routers. In the same time it is pretty bad for many things (e.g. MySQL Galera Cluster that we use). So, my take on Amazon EC2: you want to use it when you are small (i.e. don't really care about performance) or when you are really big (when you can get "special" deal from Amazon and dedicate a lot of internal resources to make it work). In other cases a better option might be a mix of dedicated hardware (servers and networking stuff) and virtual servers at a managed hosting provider that would allow you to create the setup that works best for your project.

dorfsmay 13y ago
Network latency is very inconsistent on EC2. This is a huge issue is you use a piece of software that assume that you are in a data centre with good networking, as you'd expect in an regular data centre.
- lsh123 13y ago
  It's not about "assuming" things. It's about severe performance degradation beyond any expected levels. Yes, there are solutions to workaround these things. But it will cost way more than a dedicated hardware setup if you account all the costs (software licenses, OPS salaries, etc).
  - lucian1900 13y ago
    Assumptions are certainly part of it. Software is often designed to consider certain round-trips cheap and others expensive. If this assumption does not apply, it will perform terribly.

Nux 13y ago

It's almost funny to notice so many people got so brainwashed with "the cloud" hype - especially AWS hype - they completely ignore the alternative and end up paying more for less. "But hey, we're elastic. Gigity!" :-)

jasonkester 13y ago

I sometimes feel like I'm the only one using EC2 as it was intended. S3stat's nightly job takes about 60 hours to run, and it needs to start and finish between 3am and 6am every morning. Amazon kindly keeps 20 machines ready to do that for me and only charges the time I'm actually using them. That's pretty amazing, and well worth the price in my mind. So yeah, if you need a box to run your webserver 24/7/365, you can find a better deal elsewhere. But that's really never been what EC2 is for. To continue the example, S3stat.com lives in a cage at a colo since, as the author points out, that's a much better deal than running it on EC2.

TazeTSchnitzel 13y ago
It's in the name, of course: Elastic Compute Cloud. If you need a static cloud, it's not for you.
CodeFoo 13y ago
> So yeah, if you need a box to run your webserver 24/7/365, you can find a better deal elsewhere. But that's really never been what EC2 is for. What Amazon offering is? This is AWS we're talking about. They have a service solution for nearly everything. You're saying in 2013 they still don't have a service for 24/7/365 website hosting?
- nirvdrum 13y ago
  I know you were asking for effect, but of course they do and it's EC2. That's why they have a heavy reservation pricing tier, which only makes sense for 24/7/365 (you pay for hours even if you don't use them). But, it's fun to point at "elastic" and tell people they're "doing it wrong" because they don't take a name chosen 7 years ago literally. As if somehow the service (called EC2 virtually everywhere -- not Elastic Cloud Compute) could never evolve beyond that initial use case. Incidentally, the "elastic" in EBS must have a different meaning because one of its primary selling points is that it's persistent storage.
  - Goladus 13y ago
    In other words they took a system targeted especially at people who needed on-demand computing and as it got popular, adapted it to the needs of the 24/7/365 web-hosting by offering an alternate pricing model, point-and-click user interfaces and additional features and services like EBS and CloudWatch. The point is absolutely not that EC2 never evolved beyond its initial use case and isn't good at other things. The point is that while they have 24/7/365 hosting services, there's never been any reason to expect that they would be better at it than anyone else. So why do we continue to see blog posts about not liking EC2 with vague complaints about the horrible price-to-performance ratio getting lots of upvotes?

mva 13y ago

First, people seem to think EC2 saves you time and hassle. Compared to collocated servers, this is true. But compared to dedicated servers, managed or unmanaged, it simply isn't. Hardware fails? They'll replace it (at no cost). I totally disagree. OK, maybe it takes a bit more time to set everything up, but when you have it all up and running (AMI's, Autoscaling, etc.) you have a robust setup that can scale when you scale (up or down). Adding a new instance literally only takes some minutes. Try that with a dedicated setup. It's more expensive for sure, but comes with a lot of flexibility. What I see as an EC2 (or AWS in general) issue / challenge is that it's hard to switch providers. When you use S3, SQS, Cloudwatch, Elasticache, Cloudfront, DynamoDB, SES, Route53 your code is totally integrated / adapted to AWS. You can't take your code and deploy it on a different setup elsewhere.

jaynate 13y ago
In that case I would say you have architected an app for aws, then, and we should be careful not to do that for portability's sake. Http://www.12factor.net/backing-services

count 13y ago

How many folks saying EC2 is too expensive because there is a cheaper alternative are doing so on a Macbook of some kind?

stitchy 13y ago

I wish that the author had actually included a benchmark with nice pretty graphs. The list of example hardware is nice, but doesn't tell me nearly as much as a couple of benchmarks would. Blanket statements such as "EC2's price-to-performance ratio is horrible" don't really do much to convince me. Yeah, the author is probably correct. But to what extent is he correct?

JoeAltmaier 13y ago

Our interactive server-based app (TeamSpace) absolutely cannot run in AWS/EC2. The latency is the killer. Even when throughput is high, latency per message can be 100s of milliseconds in/out of a datacenter, which is on top of our app latency and our client latency, leading to a miserable experience.

Ihmahr 13y ago

What about the fact that it is run by a dirty coal generator? No one cares?

papsosouid 13y ago

I see these complaints a lot, and they are certainly accurate, but they miss the point. I use AWS because when an app server explodes, a new one is automatically spun up and added to the load balancer pool. The OS image is loaded from s3, which I don't have to worry about backing up. The app is loaded from s3, the templates are loaded from s3. I don't have to do anything. I would absolutely love to use dedicated hardware for the consistent performance. But where can I get dedicated hardware that lets me provision new servers automatically and have them running with our custom OS image in minutes?

clouddurden 13y ago

The amount of FUD in this article, and on this thread are amazing. The folks who claim it is more expensive to run AWS over on-premises infrastructure are either not counting their total costs (power, staff, off-site data storage, co-location) or not architecting things properly on AWS.

bifrost 13y ago

Lets take the m2.4xlarge reserved instance type, it costs somewhere around $2k/month on AWS, but with a "generic hosting provider" it costs about %10-15 of that. Don't forget the 5-20% virtualization performance penalty either. The tradeoff is that for $2k you can get it pretty quickly and shut it down whenever you want, but if you spend more than 80hrs a month with that in use you should really get a dedicated resource somewhere else...