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"A measly hundred buck"? I didnt know we dont care about cash anymore. My whole argument is that the advantages of EC2 dont outweigh the cost benefit. When you

"A measly hundred buck"? I didnt know we dont care about cash anymore. My whole argument is that the advantages of EC2 dont outweigh the cost benefit. When you say things like that then sure, go nuts. I have some monster cables to sell you also, superior quality for sure. I wouldnt say text sites pushing over a TB are rare. I have a few myself doing over that ( petitionspot.com does 2+ TB a month ) - That particular site runs on a 5520 QC with 6 gigs of ram and 10tb transfer for 200$ a month ) If I was to put that same site on EC2, I would be paying significantly more, as I doubt even the large instance could handle it. 1.2ghz opterons are not exactly speed demons. For the sake of argument, lets say the Large Instance could handle it though. Pricing at 34 cents a hour = 252.96 a month Bandwidth costs, 2TB = 340.00 a month So we can either pay 592.96 for a less powerful machine, Or 200, for one that has 8TB more bandwidth to play with, and has roughly twice the processing power. In case you are feeling frisky, you can upgrade the ram to 12gb for 75$ a month. Still significantly cheaper. https://orders.gigenet.com/index.php?order=true&form=235&periods=quarterly https://orders.gigenet.com/index.php?order=true&form=235... Heres a link to the server I mention above.

moe 17y ago
As stated in my other comments I'm mostly coming in from the angle of bigger deployments (3+ hosts) here. That's where EC2 starts to make sense - not always, but often. For your site, without knowing the details, I have no doubt that you made a sound decision. You should just be open to revisit that decision once it grows to a point where a few hundred bucks difference a month don't weigh as much anymore. Or rather, where the added flexibility makes that difference worthwhile. - That's all I was trying to say.
DanBlake 17y ago
I use VPS for overflow. The hourly billing lets me add in a hardcore box for a few hours when something gets popular or a celeb endorses it. Im a big fan of the cloud, I just dont think it makes economical sense to run something on it all the time. The cloud makes sense to me only when you dont run your stuff on it all the time.
vzach 17y ago
Your calculation does not consider reserved instances. Reserved instances allow you to get the cost of running a large instance down to $127/month (not including bandwidth, on a 3 year contract) or $163/month (not including bandwidth, 1 year contract). Does not change the overall picture though. You also do not differentiate between traffic in and out ("in" is currently free fo EC2 and in any case cheaper than traffic out) - this may be significant depending on the kind of service you run (for most applications it won't be). Similarly: if you make use of other Amazon Services (in particular S3 which you too seemed to like) this would count as external traffic from servers external to amazon but not from EC2. However, again, for most applications that would probably not change the overall picture. But i do see one argument that can change the picture: if you use ec2 for overflow, testing and short time workloads and some other hosting (in-house?) for everything else, then this significantly complicates your infrastructure, i.e. you need take care of your in house servers and understand ec2. This may be significant enough to run even long running servers in the cloud.

moe 17y ago

As stated in my other comments I'm mostly coming in from the angle of bigger deployments (3+ hosts) here. That's where EC2 starts to make sense - not always, but often. For your site, without knowing the details, I have no doubt that you made a sound decision. You should just be open to revisit that decision once it grows to a point where a few hundred bucks difference a month don't weigh as much anymore. Or rather, where the added flexibility makes that difference worthwhile. - That's all I was trying to say.

DanBlake 17y ago

I use VPS for overflow. The hourly billing lets me add in a hardcore box for a few hours when something gets popular or a celeb endorses it. Im a big fan of the cloud, I just dont think it makes economical sense to run something on it all the time. The cloud makes sense to me only when you dont run your stuff on it all the time.

vzach 17y ago

Your calculation does not consider reserved instances. Reserved instances allow you to get the cost of running a large instance down to $127/month (not including bandwidth, on a 3 year contract) or $163/month (not including bandwidth, 1 year contract). Does not change the overall picture though. You also do not differentiate between traffic in and out ("in" is currently free fo EC2 and in any case cheaper than traffic out) - this may be significant depending on the kind of service you run (for most applications it won't be). Similarly: if you make use of other Amazon Services (in particular S3 which you too seemed to like) this would count as external traffic from servers external to amazon but not from EC2. However, again, for most applications that would probably not change the overall picture. But i do see one argument that can change the picture: if you use ec2 for overflow, testing and short time workloads and some other hosting (in-house?) for everything else, then this significantly complicates your infrastructure, i.e. you need take care of your in house servers and understand ec2. This may be significant enough to run even long running servers in the cloud.