I got $16.5 per month rate for 1 year of a small (which is 1.7gb). This is dedicated performance, as opposed to the bad performance of a shared system like ope

I got $16.5 per month rate for 1 year of a small (which is 1.7gb). This is dedicated performance, as opposed to the bad performance of a shared system like openredis, which is $25 a month for a small (200mb). (These systems put artificial limits on things like # of ports, etc. They also share with neighbors as you say, which makes them less reliable in performance - noisy neighbor problem.) So unless you only need 25mb of cache and have very little load, EC2 is significantly cheaper.