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Super interesting. If I did the math right, a 3year heavy reserved t2.micro instance comes out to $4.48/mo, which is cost competitive with Digital Ocean. The pr

by zrail 12y ago

Super interesting. If I did the math right, a 3year heavy reserved t2.micro instance comes out to $4.48/mo, which is cost competitive with Digital Ocean. The proof will come in the benchmarks, but this may become my preferred hosting solution.

mathrawka 12y ago
That assumes that Digital Ocean doesn't improve their offering via a hardware upgrade or price discount in the next 3 years.
- lelf 12y ago
  You can be pretty sure Amazon will do that too
  - _delirium 12y ago
    They will, but only for people who didn't lock in a reserved instance. Amazon doesn't typically upgrade instance types, but rather introduces new ones. So if you lock in a t2.micro instance for a 3-year reserved period, you are stuck with exactly those specs for 3 years. If they introduce a t3.* instance class next year, you don't get a free upgrade to the new specs.
    - arturhoo 12y ago
      A year or so ago, they introduced the ability to change the instance type between the same family type [1]. [1] http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ri-modifying.html http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ri-modify...
      - _delirium 12y ago
        That increases the flexibility, but afaict doesn't help with the upgradeability angle. When Amazon passes along the technological dividend by creating new instances with a better price/performance profile, it's usually as new family types. So your reserved t2.* instance can swap with other t2.* instances, but won't be able to take advantage of any t3.* instance that's introduced in the future. It's not a huge deal, just something to take into account when projecting out costs: the 3-year reserved instances are locking in today's prices until 2017, in return for a discount over today's non-reserved prices. Whether this produces long term gains requires some assumptions about how the market will change over the next 3 years.
  - lsc 12y ago
    The interesting thing about Amazon (vs the VPS market, where DigitalOcean, Linode, and I live) is that when amazon lowers prices, they lower prices for existing customers who don't make changes to their accounts. When a VPS provider like Linode lowers their prices, they usually charge existing customers the same amount, and simply give them more resources. Just an observation. I'm not criticizing either way of doing things; obviously, lowering prices straight out is better for the customer, and keeping revenue stable while just upgrading hardware is better for the provider. Last time I lowered prices, I lowered prices directly, and just took the revenue hit. I'm planning my next upgrade now, and instead of lowering prices, I plan on giving everyone more ram/disk/ssd, while holding prices steady. It is something I've thought about... the problem is that I'm going to have to go down by more than half, and it's way easier to lease enough hardware to more than double everyone's allocations than it is to double my customer base to make up for the lost revenue.
    - jwn 12y ago
      Perhaps I have selective memory, but I've never seen Linode lower prices, they just keep upping the specs on the lowest tier. It reminds me of something I learned while working for Comcast years ago - never lower prices, just keep adding "value".
      - lsc 12y ago
        >Perhaps I have selective memory, but I've never seen Linode lower prices, they just keep upping the specs on the lowest tier. Yes, exactly. I'm saying that is the standard way to do it in the VPS market, in part because until D.O. most of us were self-funding, and it's way easier to pay for double the compute resources than to deal with a 50% cut in revenue. In the "cloud" market where amazon is, the standard way to do it is to directly lower prices.
    - koko775 12y ago
      As one of your customers, I've already committed $X to my instance. I would be delighted to get 2x resources compared to .5x cost.
  - asharpe 12y ago
    Be careful here. Despite announcing 42 price reductions over the 7 years of AWS existence, the M1 tier was only reduced for the first time in 3 years after Google/Azure dropped their pricing. They push through a huge number of price drops, but sometimes (actually often) their headline drop is one very small, unique charge, leaving everything else unaffected.
livid 12y ago
Pricing plans of DigitalOcean and Linode included some free data transfer, while you will need to pay for data transfer on AWS.
- adventured 12y ago
  And that's worth quite a lot, given Amazon's bandwidth is expensive. The 2tb in the Linode $10 account will run you about $200 with Amazon. Doubtful anyone is burning 2tb on a $10 account, and I'm sure Linode has that in mind, but even if you're using 200gb of bandwidth that would still cost you over $20.
- threeseed 12y ago
  Pricing plans for Amazon also include the best security and interconnects bar none, fastest access to the wide array of AWS and AWS hosted services and an ecosystem of tools and apps. And of course Amazon has transparent disclosure for outages and security issues unlike say Linode.
- rogerdpack 12y ago
  don't forget that the network transfer from an aws server may be slower than from a linode/DO as well. Any benchmarks out there?
keytomouse 12y ago
It's $77 for 1 year reserved if I'm reading it correctly. That's $6.44 per month for an instance with double the RAM of the DO $5 instance. The specs look like the size that DO is charging $10 for currently. For a 3 year reserved instance it's $4.48 a month for double the size of the DO $5 instance. There's also a free tier, so the first year is free to try it out. DO was competitive with EC2 on price but not on features (and certainly not on security), now with the price advantage gone... EDIT: corrected calculation
- adamors 12y ago
  The price of an EC2 instance doesn't include data transfer though. For the $5 DO instance you get 1TB of traffic for free. The price advantage is definitely not gone.
  - keytomouse 12y ago
    How many customers use more than 1GB of outbound traffic per month for a $5 server? Data transfer in is free on EC2 and the first 1GB outbound is free too according to the pricing page.
    - jlawer 12y ago
      Isn't the first GB of your account traffic free with AWS vs DO giving you 1 TB per droplet? While 1 EC2 instance may not use more then 1 GB (which is a very low quota unless your CDNing everything), if you have a couple of instances your almost certainly going over that.
- penguindev 12y ago
  $51 is only the up front fee. It's $77 for the year, plus you need an EBS volume - say $6 for a magnetic disk 10 GB EBS, or $12 for an SSD.
  - keytomouse 12y ago
    ok, so about $6.90 per month for 1 year then including storage. Thats still less than a 1GB RAM DO server which goes for $10 per month, and much less if you go for 3 years. Factoring in 1 year of free tier makes it even less.
bhouston 12y ago
The issue is that this offering is complex to understand as opposed to DO which is incredibly simple to understand. It is actually pretty funny how hard it is to understand this offering from AWS, it takes many paragraphs of reading to figure it out.
- wmf 12y ago
  There's nothing to understand with DO because they don't tell you what their definition of a "CPU" is. For all I know it could be oversubscribed in a worse way than EC2.
  - rogerdpack 12y ago
    I typically get 97% of one core for my $5 instance, FWIW (or 100, depending on load of the box, I presume).
  - dm2 12y ago
    Most people don't care the exact speed of the CPU for a server, as long as it's stable and doesn't lockup with little load, especially when purchasing a Micro instance. If CPU utilization is high then it's time to upgrade to another CPU or start another instance if possible. It would be better to do real speed tests of each service to determine average "CPU" speed. I'm sure both services are constantly optimizing for both shared hardware usage and speed, so the stats would have to be updated regularly.
    - wmf 12y ago
      So if you don't care you shouldn't penalize Amazon for telling you how it works.
- twistedpair 12y ago
  AWS is a simple model: pay for what you use. Most cheap hosts (i.e. please kill me DreamHost) give you no SLA and your rolling the uptime dice. Three years on DH and I wanted to kill myself. Three years on AWS and life is just splendid! To understand your billing, you need to understand what you're consuming, which you always should. These credits add a little wrinkle, but also make the service cheaper and more deterministic. If you have credits, you'll get the CPU you bought with them.
AJ72 12y ago
I would replace 'super interesting' with 'Super complex'. It's an example of how you can make the price of a $10-40/mo server complex to the extent that you need to read the blog post numerous times before you understand the construct. And even then, one still needs to factor in the 'other' costs like I/O or IOPs, disk (persistent/EBS), IPs, internet and inter-region data transfer… before you understand the real cost. And then you need to compare to other instance types (which soon will cover the full alphabet -- c, cg, cr, g, h, i, m, r, t… ) and then other providers. You still have several unresolved issue - 1. Are your assumption on usage (cpu, I/O, internet etc) correct? Will they change? 2. How do I compare performance across providers for a given VM specification. 3. Can I get support when I need it? And I am sure there are others It certainly means there is room for other players who just make it simple, whether they are infrastructure folk (like DO/Linode etc) or platform plays that make the pricing understandable by the audience they are trying to target (like Heroku/Ninefold)

by zrail 12y ago

mathrawka 12y ago

That assumes that Digital Ocean doesn't improve their offering via a hardware upgrade or price discount in the next 3 years.

lelf 12y ago
You can be pretty sure Amazon will do that too
- _delirium 12y ago
  They will, but only for people who didn't lock in a reserved instance. Amazon doesn't typically upgrade instance types, but rather introduces new ones. So if you lock in a t2.micro instance for a 3-year reserved period, you are stuck with exactly those specs for 3 years. If they introduce a t3.* instance class next year, you don't get a free upgrade to the new specs.
  - arturhoo 12y ago
    A year or so ago, they introduced the ability to change the instance type between the same family type [1]. [1] http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ri-modifying.html http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ri-modify...
    - _delirium 12y ago
      That increases the flexibility, but afaict doesn't help with the upgradeability angle. When Amazon passes along the technological dividend by creating new instances with a better price/performance profile, it's usually as new family types. So your reserved t2.* instance can swap with other t2.* instances, but won't be able to take advantage of any t3.* instance that's introduced in the future. It's not a huge deal, just something to take into account when projecting out costs: the 3-year reserved instances are locking in today's prices until 2017, in return for a discount over today's non-reserved prices. Whether this produces long term gains requires some assumptions about how the market will change over the next 3 years.
- lsc 12y ago
  The interesting thing about Amazon (vs the VPS market, where DigitalOcean, Linode, and I live) is that when amazon lowers prices, they lower prices for existing customers who don't make changes to their accounts. When a VPS provider like Linode lowers their prices, they usually charge existing customers the same amount, and simply give them more resources. Just an observation. I'm not criticizing either way of doing things; obviously, lowering prices straight out is better for the customer, and keeping revenue stable while just upgrading hardware is better for the provider. Last time I lowered prices, I lowered prices directly, and just took the revenue hit. I'm planning my next upgrade now, and instead of lowering prices, I plan on giving everyone more ram/disk/ssd, while holding prices steady. It is something I've thought about... the problem is that I'm going to have to go down by more than half, and it's way easier to lease enough hardware to more than double everyone's allocations than it is to double my customer base to make up for the lost revenue.
  - jwn 12y ago
    Perhaps I have selective memory, but I've never seen Linode lower prices, they just keep upping the specs on the lowest tier. It reminds me of something I learned while working for Comcast years ago - never lower prices, just keep adding "value".
    - lsc 12y ago
      >Perhaps I have selective memory, but I've never seen Linode lower prices, they just keep upping the specs on the lowest tier. Yes, exactly. I'm saying that is the standard way to do it in the VPS market, in part because until D.O. most of us were self-funding, and it's way easier to pay for double the compute resources than to deal with a 50% cut in revenue. In the "cloud" market where amazon is, the standard way to do it is to directly lower prices.
  - koko775 12y ago
    As one of your customers, I've already committed $X to my instance. I would be delighted to get 2x resources compared to .5x cost.
- asharpe 12y ago
  Be careful here. Despite announcing 42 price reductions over the 7 years of AWS existence, the M1 tier was only reduced for the first time in 3 years after Google/Azure dropped their pricing. They push through a huge number of price drops, but sometimes (actually often) their headline drop is one very small, unique charge, leaving everything else unaffected.

livid 12y ago

Pricing plans of DigitalOcean and Linode included some free data transfer, while you will need to pay for data transfer on AWS.

adventured 12y ago
And that's worth quite a lot, given Amazon's bandwidth is expensive. The 2tb in the Linode $10 account will run you about $200 with Amazon. Doubtful anyone is burning 2tb on a $10 account, and I'm sure Linode has that in mind, but even if you're using 200gb of bandwidth that would still cost you over $20.
threeseed 12y ago
Pricing plans for Amazon also include the best security and interconnects bar none, fastest access to the wide array of AWS and AWS hosted services and an ecosystem of tools and apps. And of course Amazon has transparent disclosure for outages and security issues unlike say Linode.
rogerdpack 12y ago
don't forget that the network transfer from an aws server may be slower than from a linode/DO as well. Any benchmarks out there?

keytomouse 12y ago

It's $77 for 1 year reserved if I'm reading it correctly. That's $6.44 per month for an instance with double the RAM of the DO $5 instance. The specs look like the size that DO is charging $10 for currently. For a 3 year reserved instance it's $4.48 a month for double the size of the DO $5 instance. There's also a free tier, so the first year is free to try it out. DO was competitive with EC2 on price but not on features (and certainly not on security), now with the price advantage gone... EDIT: corrected calculation

adamors 12y ago
The price of an EC2 instance doesn't include data transfer though. For the $5 DO instance you get 1TB of traffic for free. The price advantage is definitely not gone.
- keytomouse 12y ago
  How many customers use more than 1GB of outbound traffic per month for a $5 server? Data transfer in is free on EC2 and the first 1GB outbound is free too according to the pricing page.
  - jlawer 12y ago
    Isn't the first GB of your account traffic free with AWS vs DO giving you 1 TB per droplet? While 1 EC2 instance may not use more then 1 GB (which is a very low quota unless your CDNing everything), if you have a couple of instances your almost certainly going over that.
penguindev 12y ago
$51 is only the up front fee. It's $77 for the year, plus you need an EBS volume - say $6 for a magnetic disk 10 GB EBS, or $12 for an SSD.
- keytomouse 12y ago
  ok, so about $6.90 per month for 1 year then including storage. Thats still less than a 1GB RAM DO server which goes for $10 per month, and much less if you go for 3 years. Factoring in 1 year of free tier makes it even less.

bhouston 12y ago

The issue is that this offering is complex to understand as opposed to DO which is incredibly simple to understand. It is actually pretty funny how hard it is to understand this offering from AWS, it takes many paragraphs of reading to figure it out.

wmf 12y ago
There's nothing to understand with DO because they don't tell you what their definition of a "CPU" is. For all I know it could be oversubscribed in a worse way than EC2.
- rogerdpack 12y ago
  I typically get 97% of one core for my $5 instance, FWIW (or 100, depending on load of the box, I presume).
- dm2 12y ago
  Most people don't care the exact speed of the CPU for a server, as long as it's stable and doesn't lockup with little load, especially when purchasing a Micro instance. If CPU utilization is high then it's time to upgrade to another CPU or start another instance if possible. It would be better to do real speed tests of each service to determine average "CPU" speed. I'm sure both services are constantly optimizing for both shared hardware usage and speed, so the stats would have to be updated regularly.
  - wmf 12y ago
    So if you don't care you shouldn't penalize Amazon for telling you how it works.
twistedpair 12y ago
AWS is a simple model: pay for what you use. Most cheap hosts (i.e. please kill me DreamHost) give you no SLA and your rolling the uptime dice. Three years on DH and I wanted to kill myself. Three years on AWS and life is just splendid! To understand your billing, you need to understand what you're consuming, which you always should. These credits add a little wrinkle, but also make the service cheaper and more deterministic. If you have credits, you'll get the CPU you bought with them.

AJ72 12y ago

I would replace 'super interesting' with 'Super complex'. It's an example of how you can make the price of a $10-40/mo server complex to the extent that you need to read the blog post numerous times before you understand the construct. And even then, one still needs to factor in the 'other' costs like I/O or IOPs, disk (persistent/EBS), IPs, internet and inter-region data transfer… before you understand the real cost. And then you need to compare to other instance types (which soon will cover the full alphabet -- c, cg, cr, g, h, i, m, r, t… ) and then other providers. You still have several unresolved issue - 1. Are your assumption on usage (cpu, I/O, internet etc) correct? Will they change? 2. How do I compare performance across providers for a given VM specification. 3. Can I get support when I need it? And I am sure there are others It certainly means there is room for other players who just make it simple, whether they are infrastructure folk (like DO/Linode etc) or platform plays that make the pricing understandable by the audience they are trying to target (like Heroku/Ninefold)