6 ms·

Easy Amazon EC2 Instance Comparison

90 points by benhomie 13y ago

bvancea 13y ago
I just started using AWS yesterday and was pretty annoyed by the really counter-intuitive AWS website. I've been using other IAAS before, but AWS's information is all over the place. Thanks a lot, really helpful for me atleast!
aristidb 13y ago
Am I missing something or does this not include options for the reserved instances? Because _that_ is the part of the EC2 pricing that is most confusing to me.
- sitkack 13y ago
  Reserved instances are most likely for people not like us. You should be modeling your apps to take advantage of spot pricing not reserved.
  - velodrome 13y ago
    Is there a reason you specifically want spot pricing over reserved? Do you save more money?
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
    - grosskur 13y ago
      Yes, spot instances are significantly cheaper than even reserved instances. For example, a 3-year heavy utilization cc2.8xlarge instance costs $0.49/hr (with $10K up-front!), whereas its costs only $0.27/hr on the spot market (with nothing up-front). Your spot instance could run happily for several days or it could get killed 5 minutes later if there's a price spike. You have to accept uncertainty in exchange for the cheaper price. Combining reserved instances with spot instances in the same pool can be a good strategy because you get cost-savings while also maintaining a minimum capacity. You can also spread spot instances over different availability zones, since spot price varies across zones. FYI, I created an app that charts spot prices over time across various instance types, regions, and availability zones: http://ec2price.com/ http://ec2price.com/
- kpras 13y ago
  To get an idea of relative savings in reserved instance prices compared to ondemand ones , you can try http://promptcloud.com/ec2-ondemand-vs-reserved-instance-pricing.php http://promptcloud.com/ec2-ondemand-vs-reserved-instance-pri... . It was HN couple of months back.
aquark 13y ago
Having an option to show the effective monthly rate (incl. the amortized up front cost) for light/medium/heavy reserved instances would be great ... I always end up creating a spreadsheet for those.
yeleti 13y ago
always wanted this. ended up putting numbers in excel. thanks.
stephenr 13y ago
I still don’t understand this industry’s obsession with predefined fixed limits on unrelated resources. Just because I want lots of RAM, why do I necessarily need lots of disk and/or lots of transfer? Or vice versa, why do I need to pay for lots of tranfer and RAM to get lots of disk? I get that AWS has separate billing for data, but they still tie CPU, RAM and Disk space together, as do most “traditional” VPS hosts. And even more confusing to me, is why anyone with any sense would pay for these things?
- elithrar 13y ago
  > I still don’t understand this industry’s obsession with predefined fixed limits on unrelated resources. 1. It keeps their billing simpler. They would have to (or otherwise make it up elsewhere) charge different rates for different resources, making it relatively confusing + increasing support costs. 2. Much easier to forecast resources. If you know that you can fit X instances of type Y on a box, or W instances of type Z, it's easier to understand when/where you will need more hardware. It's not perfect, I agree, but if an ad-hoc VPS product was profitable I'm sure we'd have seen it by now.
  - asharp 13y ago
    It's more of a capability thing. If you're running, say, Piston cloud you're using ceph over ethernet to back your disks, so you can easily decouple disk usage and ram usage. If you're stuck using local disks (ie. rackspace/joyent/linode/amazon to a point/etc.), then it's a lot harder to provide that sort of product. That being said there are providers out there that sell it, and have been for years.
    - stephenr 13y ago
      I’m very aware there are, and we use one of them. How is it harder (technically. I realise billing is more complex)? You have some software that provisions a VPS with the requested resource limits.
  - stephenr 13y ago
    That’s the thing - they DO exist, its just that the “big” players don’t offer them. I almost get why big companies (Rackspace, MT, etc) don’t offer it - if you can make a schmuck pay $X hundreds and hundreds of GB of disk he will never use, just because he needs 4GB of RAM or a lot of transfer, in theory you can over provision the hardware. What I really don’t get though, is the technically savvy people that think they’re somehow getting a reasonable service?
kudu 13y ago
The question is, why would you use EC2 instead of DigitalOcean?
- velodrome 13y ago
  How is DOs network uptime compared to AWS?
- morgo 13y ago
  AWS has a lot of managed infrastructure components like RDS, EMR, S3.
  - jokull 13y ago
    ELB, CloudFront, SQS, SES ... it’s nice to have those things at your disposal even though alternatives exist. Consolidated billing, fewer accounts to log into (admin overhead) etc.
- teraflop 13y ago
  For applications that don't need guaranteed uptime or SSDs, you can save a lot of money with EC2 spot instances. I can get an m1.large instance and 80GB of EBS storage for about $27/month; comparable specs would cost $80 from DigitalOcean.
semanticist 13y ago
I think it's more useful to be able to build up a more real-world deployment with storage costs, etc all built in, like you can do with PlanForCloud. That gives you a monthly/yearly final number, which is more useful for comparing against other 'cloud' providers, or for making the point that often it's cheaper to use standard VM or dedicated server providers. This tool is great, but only if you're only looking at EC2, and I think that's a mistake these days.
- okrasz 13y ago
  Another site that is also helpful to make provider comparisons is http://www.cloudorado.com/ http://www.cloudorado.com/
wanghq 13y ago
In case anyone wants to estimate the cost of other services. AWS simple monthly calculator: http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/calc5.html http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/calc5.html
ye 13y ago
It would be nice to have a column for a 30.44 day cost (average month). EC2 is ridiculously expensive, considering the prices at Linode, Hetzner, DigitalOcean, OVH, LeaseWeb and 100tb.
- eloff 13y ago
  Just having checked out the companies you mentioned, they are cheaper for small-midsize hosting solutions. For running large memory and bandwidth hungry servers they just can't deliver. On Amazon you can get 256GB of ram with dedicated 10GBps clustered networking. None of the options you listed can go above 1GBps and it won't be dedicated (you'll get a 1GBps port onto a shared network, and you'll be at the mercy of the traffic conditions inside their data center.) Amazon also has a huge amount of cloudy solutions which is not to be sneezed at.
  - ye 13y ago
    This one allows up to 384GB RAM: http://www.hetzner.de/hosting/produkte_rootserver/dx290 http://www.hetzner.de/hosting/produkte_rootserver/dx290 And it costs a fraction of EC2, which would cost you $2556 for 30.44 days. I could get 10 servers with 1 Gbit each, and it will still be cheaper than EC2.
    - eloff 13y ago
      Ok, that's interesting. It's non-obvious that it was possible from their site. But the network is still a major problem. 10 servers @ 1gbit are not equal to 1 @ 10gbit depennding on your use case. In my case the database is network limited, and it's extremely not-nice to have to partition it horizontally.
- monkeyspaw 13y ago
  10x in cost isn't necessarily the most important factor to a business. From an individual's perspective, that's hard to understand. To a business, it really isn't that difficult to justify the cost. One of my criticisms of HN commenters is the inability to empathize from a company's POV. Just because it doesn't make sense to you doesn't mean it doesn't make sense! Companies (especially big ones) have different priorities than individuals. I may think it's stupid to 10x infrastructure costs by using AWS. A company may say "that's 1% of my budget, and it keeps my development running smoothly and developers happy with the familiarity and flexibility. I make that 10x cost back in 30 minutes, every day. Not worth optimizing."
iconara 13y ago
Here's a different service I made that includes other regions, continously updated spot instance prices, and a few other nice features: http://ec2pricing.iconara.info/ http://ec2pricing.iconara.info/ It's also available as an API: http://ec2pricing.herokuapp.com/api/v1/eu-west-1/ http://ec2pricing.herokuapp.com/api/v1/eu-west-1/
geuis 13y ago
I can't select any of the menu options on my phone.
rspeer 13y ago
These costs don't include the cost of provisioned IOPS, right? Without provisioned IOPS, the I/O performance is going to range from "very low" to "low", not "low" to "very high".
- AsymetricCom 13y ago
  Provisioned IOPS is just a method for other large corporations to donate to AWS without C-level approval.
  - immad 13y ago
    what do you mean by donate?
    - AsymetricCom 13y ago
      As in I give you this money and you make sure I can keep giving you money.
  - monkeyspaw 13y ago
    If you view money spend on reducing risk that ended up not being fulfilled, I believe you are correct. However, one major component of businesses that private individuals do not understand is the value of risk reduction. In a major sense, many businesses are in the business of reducing or quantifying risk. To an individual, it may not be worth $100k to make sure everything runs correctly. To a business, that might be an easy decision. It is especially compounded because private individuals don't typically calculate the cost of their time. If a business can spend $100k to make sure their website doesn't go down, their ROI calculation is: probability_of_downtime * cost_per_unit_downtime + cost_to_fix + cost_to_report_causes + cost_to_explain_why_it_happened. At $100 - $300 per hour per employee, costs rise FAST. Businesses need to control risk, and will pay money to do so.
shrike 13y ago
There is also http://www.awsnow.info/ http://www.awsnow.info/, now with RESTful access to pricing.
coolrhymes 13y ago
AWS has a full blown calculator for every service they provide, not just EC2. They give you pricing by monthly, upfront cost [for reserved instances] etc. http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/calc5.html http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/calc5.html
immad 13y ago
This is useful but it doesn't cover reserved or any IOPs which is unfortunately. AWS in general makes pricing opaque and hard to reason about, more simple tools like this would be useful.
zacwitte 13y ago
This is nice, but can you add the machine name (ie. c1.xlarge) and add costs scenarios for reserved instances?
philfreo 13y ago
Please add other regions, especially us-west-1.

90 points by benhomie 13y ago

I just started using AWS yesterday and was pretty annoyed by the really counter-intuitive AWS website. I've been using other IAAS before, but AWS's information is all over the place. Thanks a lot, really helpful for me atleast!

aristidb 13y ago

Am I missing something or does this not include options for the reserved instances? Because _that_ is the part of the EC2 pricing that is most confusing to me.

sitkack 13y ago
Reserved instances are most likely for people not like us. You should be modeling your apps to take advantage of spot pricing not reserved.
- velodrome 13y ago
  Is there a reason you specifically want spot pricing over reserved? Do you save more money?
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - grosskur 13y ago
    Yes, spot instances are significantly cheaper than even reserved instances. For example, a 3-year heavy utilization cc2.8xlarge instance costs $0.49/hr (with $10K up-front!), whereas its costs only $0.27/hr on the spot market (with nothing up-front). Your spot instance could run happily for several days or it could get killed 5 minutes later if there's a price spike. You have to accept uncertainty in exchange for the cheaper price. Combining reserved instances with spot instances in the same pool can be a good strategy because you get cost-savings while also maintaining a minimum capacity. You can also spread spot instances over different availability zones, since spot price varies across zones. FYI, I created an app that charts spot prices over time across various instance types, regions, and availability zones: http://ec2price.com/ http://ec2price.com/
kpras 13y ago
To get an idea of relative savings in reserved instance prices compared to ondemand ones , you can try http://promptcloud.com/ec2-ondemand-vs-reserved-instance-pricing.php http://promptcloud.com/ec2-ondemand-vs-reserved-instance-pri... . It was HN couple of months back.

aquark 13y ago

Having an option to show the effective monthly rate (incl. the amortized up front cost) for light/medium/heavy reserved instances would be great ... I always end up creating a spreadsheet for those.

yeleti 13y ago

always wanted this. ended up putting numbers in excel. thanks.

stephenr 13y ago

I still don’t understand this industry’s obsession with predefined fixed limits on unrelated resources. Just because I want lots of RAM, why do I necessarily need lots of disk and/or lots of transfer? Or vice versa, why do I need to pay for lots of tranfer and RAM to get lots of disk? I get that AWS has separate billing for data, but they still tie CPU, RAM and Disk space together, as do most “traditional” VPS hosts. And even more confusing to me, is why anyone with any sense would pay for these things?

elithrar 13y ago
> I still don’t understand this industry’s obsession with predefined fixed limits on unrelated resources. 1. It keeps their billing simpler. They would have to (or otherwise make it up elsewhere) charge different rates for different resources, making it relatively confusing + increasing support costs. 2. Much easier to forecast resources. If you know that you can fit X instances of type Y on a box, or W instances of type Z, it's easier to understand when/where you will need more hardware. It's not perfect, I agree, but if an ad-hoc VPS product was profitable I'm sure we'd have seen it by now.
- asharp 13y ago
  It's more of a capability thing. If you're running, say, Piston cloud you're using ceph over ethernet to back your disks, so you can easily decouple disk usage and ram usage. If you're stuck using local disks (ie. rackspace/joyent/linode/amazon to a point/etc.), then it's a lot harder to provide that sort of product. That being said there are providers out there that sell it, and have been for years.
  - stephenr 13y ago
    I’m very aware there are, and we use one of them. How is it harder (technically. I realise billing is more complex)? You have some software that provisions a VPS with the requested resource limits.
- stephenr 13y ago
  That’s the thing - they DO exist, its just that the “big” players don’t offer them. I almost get why big companies (Rackspace, MT, etc) don’t offer it - if you can make a schmuck pay $X hundreds and hundreds of GB of disk he will never use, just because he needs 4GB of RAM or a lot of transfer, in theory you can over provision the hardware. What I really don’t get though, is the technically savvy people that think they’re somehow getting a reasonable service?

kudu 13y ago

The question is, why would you use EC2 instead of DigitalOcean?

velodrome 13y ago
How is DOs network uptime compared to AWS?
morgo 13y ago
AWS has a lot of managed infrastructure components like RDS, EMR, S3.
- jokull 13y ago
  ELB, CloudFront, SQS, SES ... it’s nice to have those things at your disposal even though alternatives exist. Consolidated billing, fewer accounts to log into (admin overhead) etc.
teraflop 13y ago
For applications that don't need guaranteed uptime or SSDs, you can save a lot of money with EC2 spot instances. I can get an m1.large instance and 80GB of EBS storage for about $27/month; comparable specs would cost $80 from DigitalOcean.

semanticist 13y ago

I think it's more useful to be able to build up a more real-world deployment with storage costs, etc all built in, like you can do with PlanForCloud. That gives you a monthly/yearly final number, which is more useful for comparing against other 'cloud' providers, or for making the point that often it's cheaper to use standard VM or dedicated server providers. This tool is great, but only if you're only looking at EC2, and I think that's a mistake these days.

okrasz 13y ago
Another site that is also helpful to make provider comparisons is http://www.cloudorado.com/ http://www.cloudorado.com/

wanghq 13y ago

In case anyone wants to estimate the cost of other services. AWS simple monthly calculator: http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/calc5.html http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/calc5.html

ye 13y ago

It would be nice to have a column for a 30.44 day cost (average month). EC2 is ridiculously expensive, considering the prices at Linode, Hetzner, DigitalOcean, OVH, LeaseWeb and 100tb.

eloff 13y ago
Just having checked out the companies you mentioned, they are cheaper for small-midsize hosting solutions. For running large memory and bandwidth hungry servers they just can't deliver. On Amazon you can get 256GB of ram with dedicated 10GBps clustered networking. None of the options you listed can go above 1GBps and it won't be dedicated (you'll get a 1GBps port onto a shared network, and you'll be at the mercy of the traffic conditions inside their data center.) Amazon also has a huge amount of cloudy solutions which is not to be sneezed at.
- ye 13y ago
  This one allows up to 384GB RAM: http://www.hetzner.de/hosting/produkte_rootserver/dx290 http://www.hetzner.de/hosting/produkte_rootserver/dx290 And it costs a fraction of EC2, which would cost you $2556 for 30.44 days. I could get 10 servers with 1 Gbit each, and it will still be cheaper than EC2.
  - eloff 13y ago
    Ok, that's interesting. It's non-obvious that it was possible from their site. But the network is still a major problem. 10 servers @ 1gbit are not equal to 1 @ 10gbit depennding on your use case. In my case the database is network limited, and it's extremely not-nice to have to partition it horizontally.
monkeyspaw 13y ago
10x in cost isn't necessarily the most important factor to a business. From an individual's perspective, that's hard to understand. To a business, it really isn't that difficult to justify the cost. One of my criticisms of HN commenters is the inability to empathize from a company's POV. Just because it doesn't make sense to you doesn't mean it doesn't make sense! Companies (especially big ones) have different priorities than individuals. I may think it's stupid to 10x infrastructure costs by using AWS. A company may say "that's 1% of my budget, and it keeps my development running smoothly and developers happy with the familiarity and flexibility. I make that 10x cost back in 30 minutes, every day. Not worth optimizing."

iconara 13y ago

Here's a different service I made that includes other regions, continously updated spot instance prices, and a few other nice features: http://ec2pricing.iconara.info/ http://ec2pricing.iconara.info/ It's also available as an API: http://ec2pricing.herokuapp.com/api/v1/eu-west-1/ http://ec2pricing.herokuapp.com/api/v1/eu-west-1/

geuis 13y ago

I can't select any of the menu options on my phone.

rspeer 13y ago

These costs don't include the cost of provisioned IOPS, right? Without provisioned IOPS, the I/O performance is going to range from "very low" to "low", not "low" to "very high".

AsymetricCom 13y ago
Provisioned IOPS is just a method for other large corporations to donate to AWS without C-level approval.
- immad 13y ago
  what do you mean by donate?
  - AsymetricCom 13y ago
    As in I give you this money and you make sure I can keep giving you money.
- monkeyspaw 13y ago
  If you view money spend on reducing risk that ended up not being fulfilled, I believe you are correct. However, one major component of businesses that private individuals do not understand is the value of risk reduction. In a major sense, many businesses are in the business of reducing or quantifying risk. To an individual, it may not be worth $100k to make sure everything runs correctly. To a business, that might be an easy decision. It is especially compounded because private individuals don't typically calculate the cost of their time. If a business can spend $100k to make sure their website doesn't go down, their ROI calculation is: probability_of_downtime * cost_per_unit_downtime + cost_to_fix + cost_to_report_causes + cost_to_explain_why_it_happened. At $100 - $300 per hour per employee, costs rise FAST. Businesses need to control risk, and will pay money to do so.

shrike 13y ago

There is also http://www.awsnow.info/ http://www.awsnow.info/, now with RESTful access to pricing.

coolrhymes 13y ago

AWS has a full blown calculator for every service they provide, not just EC2. They give you pricing by monthly, upfront cost [for reserved instances] etc. http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/calc5.html http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/calc5.html

immad 13y ago

This is useful but it doesn't cover reserved or any IOPs which is unfortunately. AWS in general makes pricing opaque and hard to reason about, more simple tools like this would be useful.

zacwitte 13y ago

This is nice, but can you add the machine name (ie. c1.xlarge) and add costs scenarios for reserved instances?

philfreo 13y ago

Please add other regions, especially us-west-1.