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Amazon Drops Price Of EC2 Dedicated Instances By Up To 80%
- mikiem 13y agoThese prices were ridiculous to start with. Now the are only 20% as ridiculous.
- manojlds 13y agoThat number should be less than 20%, no?
- _delirium 13y agoDirect link: http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2013/07/09/price-reductions-on-amazon-ec2-dedicated-instances/ http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2013/07/09/price-r...
- jdmitch 13y agoAmazon's response to higher demand (anticipated or real) for dedicated instances outside of the US to avoid the NSA's prying eyes?
- wmf 13y agoAren't all those servers still owned and operated by a US company?
- Create 13y agoAmazon Web Services has achieved compliance with the Federal Risk Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP). The FedRAMP program has also established a Joint Accreditation Board (JAB) consisting of Chief Information Officers from DoD, DHS and GSA.
- _stephan 13y agoHourly billed "bare-metal" cloud servers from Softlayer seem to be cheaper still: http://www.softlayer.com/cloudlayer/computing http://www.softlayer.com/cloudlayer/computing
- LogicX 13y agoand softlayer is at the high end of the market. Check out incero.com or securedservers.com for some perspective. also serverbear.com is always great to check for price-performance comparisons, especially taking into account SSD performance.
- hpkuarg 13y agoI've always been curious about these "less reputable" dedicated/colo providers. SoftLayer seems to have a great reputation, but it's also twice as expensive as, say, Incero or SecuredServers that you just mentioned. Are they reliable business partners?
- LogicX 13y agoYes, in my experience -- but thats just with one-off servers. I'm not sure how things work if you're a larger client with needs in the dozens of servers.
- _stephan 13y agoincero and securedservers don't seem to offer hourly billed dedicated servers. Monthly billed dedicated servers are a different market.
- LogicX 13y agoAgreed - and yet thats half the problem; is people aren't using EC2 for just a few hours... they use it all month, and then complain about it being expensive.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- Udo 13y agoChoosing EC2 and other Amazon offerings means a lot of freedom for startups, it's easy to just create a whole infrastructure at the push of a button. However, this comes at a high cost. Amazon is really expensive and once you're locked into their way of doing things, migrating away can be a near-impossible task. I think for some years, companies didn't realize how high the cost of running on EC2/S3 actually is compared to, say, a dedicated rack colocated somewhere - that's kind of a compliment to Amazon tech and marketing. It's still not uncommon to talk to a random startup person and they'll tell you they have hosting costs in the tens of thousands of dollars per year. When you then compare this to what they're actually doing with their servers, it seems to me they're overpaying by several orders of magnitude. I was using EC2 for years and kind of grew to accept (and ignore) its limitations. It was only when I reviewed some dedicated server plans at other providers I (re-)discovered how much raw power you can get elsewhere for the same money. Additionally, I became very frustrated with the lack of pricing transparency and inability to forecast costs - at first glance the Amazon cloud is as open as it gets but the real surprises come when you're running it for a while. No doubt Amazon has caught on to this trend and is fighting to squeeze out some competitors that have sprung up. This pricing change is most likely directly aimed at Hetzner and other inexpensive-but-powerful hosting providers. It means they were either massively overcharging the whole time or they are using profits from other plans to offer Dedicated EC2 at a loss until the competition folds.
- Fizzer 13y agoAre you comparing EC2's hourly rate with dedicated hardware? If so, you're comparing apples and oranges. With EC2, the hourly rate is outrageous for an always-on server. You really need to buy reserved instances for it to be cost-effective. In my case I found I really needed to buy the 3-year heavy utilization reserved instances. The hourly rate is best just for occasional spikes or when you're experimenting with different hardware configurations. And yes, they were massively overcharging for dedicated instances, as they charged $7300 per month just for the privilege of being able to use dedicated instances (that doesn't include the cost of the instance itself.) I always assumed they were doing so just to reserve that feature for their big customers.
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- VeejayRampay 13y agoI always wonder how a company can offer such a rebate without giving direct insight about how exactly their prices were absolutely outrageous and completely uncorrelated with the offered value to begin with. People who were paying full price prior to this rebate must feel pretty annoyed right now.
- hkmurakami 13y agoI always wonder how a company can offer such a rebate without giving direct insight about how exactly their prices were absolutely outrageous and completely uncorrelated with the offered value to begin with. I think you mean uncorrelated with the underlying cost of the service. If the price were uncorrelated with the value, people wouldn't have subscribed to AWS in the first place?
- steveklabnik 13y agoFirst rule of pricing: price to value, not to cost. People are used to the prices of things going down as economies of scale kick in. That doesn't mean it actually _happened_ here, but if you were already a happy customer at $100/month, when next month comes around and it's $20, you're just more happy.
- hkmurakami 13y agoexactly. The only reason Amazon is now lowering its price is due to competition. If not for competition they'd keep prices stable or even try to increase it. (like they're going to start doing with books) Just one reason competition is generally good for consumers, even though on a macro level one could argue that competition is inefficient.
- jessaustin 13y ago(like they're going to start doing with books) Yeah, like we've heard for years, this is coming real soon, just around the corner, here before we know it, any day now...
- toyg 13y ago
- adamseabrook 13y agoMy company runs a largish crawling infrastructure. We evaluated Amazon extensively but just could not make the price/performance calculation stack up. If you have lots of "always on" gear dedicated works out significantly cheaper. We have boxes with 256GB of RAM, 300mbps network pipes for under $330 per month and we don't have to share any CPU or Disk I/O.
- MagicWishMonkey 13y agoLikewise. My company decided to lease a rack at a colo, unlimited bandwidth (practically speaking) and we can add capacity as necessary. We're planning to (eventually) utilize Amazon to temporarily add capacity when necessary, but it will never be our primary hosting solution.
- adamseabrook 13y agoThat is the one thing we do miss. Elastically scaling dedicated boxes that can often take 12 hours from order to go live means we end up with a few hot spares laying about just in case but overall it is still cheaper.
- beachstartup 13y agowith amazon you're paying for software, not hardware. big difference.
- druiid 13y agoYep. Many businesses should (and a lot don't...) make this cost comparison. Also, 256GB of memory in a server is surprisingly not that impressive (even for a 1U server) these days! Crazy to think there are 1U machines you can cram 1TB of memory into now.
- darkarmani 13y agoWow. That's a lot of bandwidth. I re-wrote the downloaders for siteadvisor a few years ago (hosted) and they didn't need anything close to that. They were just downloading EXEs and other content from pages the crawlers had already seen, but still.
- Vitaly 13y agoNow I wander if Heroku prices will follow or if they'll decide to just pocket the difference themselves.
- rschmitty 13y agoDoes heroku run on the dedicated servers? Dedicated being different from 100% utilization reserved servers http://aws.amazon.com/dedicated-instances/ http://aws.amazon.com/dedicated-instances/ vs http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/ http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/ (which did not get 80% cuts)
- brentm 13y agoI'd think they would employ dedicated instances which they then subdivide to keep their customers as isolated as possible.
- the_mitsuhiko 13y agoAren't dedicated instances only available in VPCs? In that case Heroku would not use them as all Heroku machines are public.
- flyt 13y agoYou can easily make a VPC fully public, or have fully public subdivisions.
- wilfra 13y agoHave been on Heroku for about two years and can't recall a single price reduction in anything. I think it's pretty clear that pocketing the difference in the steady AWS price reductions is exactly what Heroku does.
- EamonLeonard 13y agoDisclosure: I work for Engine Yard. We've dropped our prices a number of times, the lastest a few months ago: https://blog.engineyard.com/2013/announcing-lower-pricing https://blog.engineyard.com/2013/announcing-lower-pricing
- forlorn 13y agoOne would think why Digital Ocean is first to come to my mind.
- wheaties 13y agoThat was my first thought. DO gives SSD drives. That's a pretty enticing offer, in and of itself. The only downside is that it appears that a lot of SaaS providers are already on Amazon, meaning your network times more than likely benefit. Would love to hear about more people on both.
- AndyKelley 13y agoI saw this article in hacker news today, and noticed somebody mentioning digital ocean. I switched one of my servers over to digital ocean to try it out. The process was smooth and enjoyable, and now I'm spending less than half as much as I was with EC2. I even got to try their recovery console after I mistakenly deleted the root password without first giving myself sudo. Worked like a charm.
- amorphid 13y agoIt wouldn't surprise me to see Digital Ocean get picked up by Amazon at some point. Amazon loves a high growth, low margin business model.
- rorrr2 13y agoPrices are still ridiculous. Compare it with something like Hetzner: https://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produkte_rootserver/ex4 https://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produkte_rootserver/ex4 https://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produkte_rootserver/ex10 https://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produkte_rootserver/ex10
- noir_lord 13y agoI'm a recent Hetzner customer. 32Gb/i7. I used them for 5 weeks, in that five week period I had 5 1-2 day blocks where the machine was unreachable. >A incoming attack influence the network for few minutes. The network department has solved the issue. few minutes was 31 hours our network-team told us, that there was again an attack which caused the issues you mentioned. 27 hours currently we can't see any issue, is this still given? connection timed out (no idea how long as I'd not installed monitoring at that point). etc etc. I canceled shortly after. I'm back on Linode for now (I actually changed the design of the product I'm developing so that I can store files onto S3 so I can stay with Linode and move easily in the future). A fast server is a paperweight without reliable network access.
- petercooper 13y agoJust as a counter point, I'm both a Linode and Hetzner user and am happy with both. My Hetzner server has had solid service for about 18 months now (with a couple of brief restarts in there) and certainly no prolonged outages. I am not particularly keen to move entirely to them, however, as I just have a gut feeling I'd prefer to have the service of someone like Linode in a true emergency. As a high powered server for experiments, side projects or things that don't demand 100% uptime (e.g. my company's collaboration software), however, Hetzner has proven superb so far.
- threeseed 13y agoThere was a true emergency with Linode. They've been hacked badly twice and both times withheld information from their customers. Bizarre that you would prefer this type of service than from others.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- manishsharan 13y agoCan someone please advise what is the most cost optimal way running MongoDB on AWS ? I am bootstrapping/coding/testing and all these options make my head spin. My web application would be running on AWS Elastic Beanstalk and they would be using the MongoDB.
- a-priori 13y agoHonestly? I wouldn't. My first choice would be to use a service like https://www.mongohq.com https://www.mongohq.com to manage it for you.
- flyt 13y agoAWS recently released a whitepaper describing the best practices for doing just this: http://media.amazonwebservices.com/AWS_NoSQL_MongoDB.pdf http://media.amazonwebservices.com/AWS_NoSQL_MongoDB.pdf [PDF]
- crb 13y agoThe 80% number was for a "dedicated instance". A dedicated instance is not the same as a reserved instance. Dedicated instances, charged on top of the regular price, are where you are guaranteed not to have anyone else on the same host server as you. Dedicated instances already cost 10% more than their regular counterparts (small/dedicated/on-demand costs 6.6/c hr vs 6c/hr.) At any point, the most you could be "wasting", was the leftover capacity on a host that only had one small server on it (they didn't do micro). Imagine a simplified version of EC2 as per [1], which fits 12 small instances on one physical host, and you could therefore be wasting 11 slots that you could run a m1.small in. They can't sell these to any other customer. If you buy a second instance, they put that on your first host; you are now wasting 10 slots. Carry on down to when you fill up your first host and spill over onto a second, back to wasting 11 slots. Previously they were charging $10/hour for those wasted 11 slots, which you could have filled by paying 72.6c/hr. Now, they're only charging $2. [1] http://perfcap.blogspot.co.uk/2011/03/understanding-and-using-amazon-ebs.html http://perfcap.blogspot.co.uk/2011/03/understanding-and-usin...
- Ihmahr 13y agoIt chocks me that no one mentions that these instances run on dirty coal plants.
- tnuc 13y agoWhat should they run on? Unicorn sparkles?
- Ihmahr 13y agoQuick google: http://www.idownloadblog.com/2012/09/14/icloud-solar-farm-nearly-complete/ http://www.idownloadblog.com/2012/09/14/icloud-solar-farm-ne... Solar or wind.
- Spiritus 13y agoThere's plenty of alternatives to coal!
- flyt 13y agoNot when you buy from the general purpose grid. You can eventually become big enough to pressure the power companies to source from cleaner generation types but that doesn't over night.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- saosebastiao 13y agoHave you actually read the greenpeace report? Amazon uses less coal than most cloud companies.
- _jmar777 13y agoThere are a lot of comments about EC2's pricing competitiveness with dedicated hardware. These are fair discussions and should be had, but I figure it's worth commenting that EC2 (and AWS in general) is about much more than cheap metal. The company that I am a developer at has aggressively adopted AWS with applications using it at both the PaaS and IaaS levels. At the end of the day what we've received the greatest value from isn't an impressive "cost per compute unit", but rather a flexibility that would be incredibly painful to let go of. For example, our QA team can spin up or tear down entire environments by chatting with our Campfire bot. Our developers can do likewise using a simple CLI we built. Granted, this isn't exactly bleeding edge stuff here... it's simply "the cloud" (apologies) delivering on the promise of dynamic, elastic environments. But it's a really, really nice promise, and at risk of sounding like an advertisement, I'll still say that AWS/EC2 has delivered quite nicely on it.
- druiid 13y agoIn all honesty you can get these same benefits from dedicated hardware. Throw openstack or similar on a set of Hetzner or similar machines and have at!
- thomaslangston 13y agoCool, I hope this helps startups that need HIPAA, PCI, and other compliance requirements.
- dschiptsov 13y ago“are ideal for workloads where corporate policies or industry regulations require that your EC2 instances be isolated from instances that belong to other customers at the host hardware level.” What a hypocrisy. This should be read as "polices require that an adequate and predictable I/O performance could be provided".
- saosebastiao 13y agoThey market their Provisioned IOPS for that purpose.
- ceejayoz 13y agoThis is usually a security requirement for big corporations with paranoid legal departments, not a performance requirement.
- rch 13y agoThere is a colo in Boulder that will host a Mac mini server for around $75/mo (negotiable). I haven't tried it yet, but I'd imagine that I could get 3-5 'servers' off of eBay and negotiate a nice monthly rate for hosting them.
- driverdan 13y agoThat doesn't seem like a very good deal. For $75/m you can get a dedicated server with equal or better specs and not worry about owning the hardware.
- rch 13y agoI rather like having a modest collection of hardware that I can call my own. That aside though, is it possible to get a dedicated server with SSD-like disk IO and 8-16 GB of memory for ~75 dollars a month? I admit that I only have experience with Rackspace, and that a few years ago, but it seemed like the pricing was more than twice that.
- thezilch 13y agoSource: http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2013/07/09/price-reductions-on-amazon-ec2-dedicated-instances/ http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2013/07/09/price-r... Not to detract from the conversation, but I've pointed out numerous times about techcrunch / this author -- FREDERIC LARDINOIS -- nearly plagiarizing the the entirety of his sources in the many articles, of his, posted here. Maybe it's not strictly plagiarism, but there is almost NEVER value added by his regurgitation. It has got to be etiquette to link to the best source, and Techcrunch has really gone south with the AOL/HuffPo relations -- cheap content rewrites and not a source.
- darkarmani 13y agoWhy do they charge the $2/hour dedicated fee for the CC2.8xlarge? Isn't that size already a dedicated instance if you just use it as an on-demand instance? You get 32 virtual cores which makes sense for a dedicated instance, since you get 16 physical cores (2x8) and the hyper-threading makes 32 virtual cores. "CC2 and CR1 Instances are backed by 2 x Intel Xeon E5-2670 processors, eight-cores with hyperthreading" Am I missing anything or is there a benefit to doing a dedicated cc2.8xlarge instance? Compliance maybe?
- RyanGWU82 13y agoCompliance is the main reason to purchase Dedicated Instances -- maybe the only reason at all. Amazon could always silently introduce better physical hardware, at which point they could put 2+ cc2.8xlarge instances on a physical server. I'm sure there are more m1.smalls on each 2013-era box than there were in 2007.
- leef 13y agoThere's no guarantee that CC2.8xlarge will own the whole box. It might be that way today, but not if Amazon runs virts on even larger boxes in the future.
- lsiebert 13y agoSo for the first year, a micro instance is basically free, right? That makes testing aws out super easy for new startups. Anyone else do something similar? If not, you are going to see people stick with the vendor they know best.
- akh 13y agoWe're going to update http://www.planforcloud.com http://www.planforcloud.com to include dedicated instances to help people forecast and compare these to other providers and EC2 purchase options. If you run enough instances, the incremental cost of the regional fee gets diluted and your overall cost is not that much higher than other purchase options.