Amazon Drops Price Of EC2 Dedicated Instances By Up To 80%(techcrunch.com)
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Amazon Drops Price Of EC2 Dedicated Instances By Up To 80%
http://techcrunch.com/2013/07/10/amazon-drops-price-of-ec2-dedicated-instances-by-up-to-80/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29
23 comments
After all the talk about how much cheaper dedicated hosting can be compared to AWS, I looked into dedicated hosting recently. It didn't seem as great as the comments here led me to believe. Rackspace for example starts at $499/month for a server with 4GB of RAM. On AWS I can get a c1.xlarge instance with 7GB of RAM for $435/month, and that's with paying the on-demand price 24x7.
Ok, that doesn't include EBS and bandwidth. So let's throw in 1TB of outbound data (less than the 2TB that Rackspace includes, but still more than I'd ever use in a month) and a 150GB EBS volume with 1000 provision IOPS. Let's also use the 1 year heavy utilization price while we're at it. Now I'm looking $342/month with $1800 upfront, which amortizes to $492/month.
With AWS I also don't need to stick with paying 24x7 for infrastructure. I don't need to keep my CI infrastructure running on nights and weekends for example, and with AWS I have the flexibility to turn that into cost savings.
So I don't see the order of magnitude price difference. So maybe I shouldn't be looking at Rackspace? Hetzner keeps coming up on here, but I don't need a server in Europe. Maybe OVH? Hmm, the comments on Hacker News don't exactly inspire confidence in OVH for something more than a personal server to screw around with. I need to run infrastructure for my business. Do I start hunting for bargain hosting providers on WebHostingTalk?
Ok, back to AWS it is for me.
EDIT: Thanks for the suggestions to look at Softlayer. A server with 1 CPU and 8GB of RAM starts at $399, which is better than Rackspace, but not exactly orders of magnitude cheaper than the c1.xlarge I mentioned above.
Ok, that doesn't include EBS and bandwidth. So let's throw in 1TB of outbound data (less than the 2TB that Rackspace includes, but still more than I'd ever use in a month) and a 150GB EBS volume with 1000 provision IOPS. Let's also use the 1 year heavy utilization price while we're at it. Now I'm looking $342/month with $1800 upfront, which amortizes to $492/month.
With AWS I also don't need to stick with paying 24x7 for infrastructure. I don't need to keep my CI infrastructure running on nights and weekends for example, and with AWS I have the flexibility to turn that into cost savings.
So I don't see the order of magnitude price difference. So maybe I shouldn't be looking at Rackspace? Hetzner keeps coming up on here, but I don't need a server in Europe. Maybe OVH? Hmm, the comments on Hacker News don't exactly inspire confidence in OVH for something more than a personal server to screw around with. I need to run infrastructure for my business. Do I start hunting for bargain hosting providers on WebHostingTalk?
Ok, back to AWS it is for me.
EDIT: Thanks for the suggestions to look at Softlayer. A server with 1 CPU and 8GB of RAM starts at $399, which is better than Rackspace, but not exactly orders of magnitude cheaper than the c1.xlarge I mentioned above.
I think you picked the most expensive dedicated hosting provider in existence. Have a look at SoftLayer, Hetzner, Incero, or one of the other alternatives. Also, at these prices, it's not unreasonable to just order any old Dell server for $600 and put it into a colo rack somewhere.
For reference, the dedicated server I rent for my private projects comes in at €49/month and it has these specs:
For reference, the dedicated server I rent for my private projects comes in at €49/month and it has these specs:
Intel® Core™ i7-2600 Quad-Core
16 GB DDR 3 RAM
2 x 3 TB SATA 6 Gb/s HDD; 7200 rpm
No ECC (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECC_memory) in that configuration. That's a serious no no for running anything but personal/low importance stuff. Random bit flips do happen and will ruin your day.
Amazon EC2 does not use ECC RAM on anything but their very high end servers either (4XL and above)
This is highly unlikely. I'm on a team that administers an EC2 infrastructure with tens of terabytes of RAM, and I've never seen anything that resembles memory errors. Considering the findings of http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~bianca/papers/sigmetrics09.pdf, this would be rather extraordinary.
That's disturbing. A quick Googling didn't find anything either way, can you provide a link that confirms this?
The whole point of the "cloud" is to use as commodity hardware as possible... accepting that failures happen. If you aren't using multiple regions and servers for deployment, with failover designs in your applications you are doing it wrong.
How do you suggest detecting corrupted memory that does not cause the instance to fail entirely, but silently corrupts your data or running processes?
Or your page cache:
https://blogs.oracle.com/ksplice/entry/attack_of_the_cosmic_...
Or your page cache:
https://blogs.oracle.com/ksplice/entry/attack_of_the_cosmic_...
Run n times, compare results. The idea of the same bit flipping twice is fairly ludicrous. These n times could be on the same machine, or distributed and compared with paxos. Then back everything up a billion times. Safety is extremely hard to guarantee, so the closest approximations will be expensive.
I doubt that would cause an instance to fail entirely in a majority of instances. Linux has it's own memory corruption checking and fixing (on 64-bit words afaik), also the customer can code their own sanity checking or CRC data to detect and eliminate them as much as possible. Also, many file or copy operations have built in corruption checking as well. Of course, on top of that you have your virtualization platform which I'm sure has it's own series of sanity checks and complex hardware handling logic.
Ultimately, it's a business decision of risk-management. Also, if you're in any kind of serious business like banking, there is already regulations around the standards of hardware/software you can use.
Ultimately, it's a business decision of risk-management. Also, if you're in any kind of serious business like banking, there is already regulations around the standards of hardware/software you can use.
[deleted]
Source, please?
This is the sort of thing for which you want the opposite: a source that they _do_ use ECC RAM for EC2 (heh ECC EC2).
Users will never know because EC2 runs on paravirtualized kernels that don't have access to SMBIOS, which would tell us that information.
However, if we can determine what machine models they use (assuming they buy branded hardware), then we will know their chipsets, and from there, we should be able to deduce whether the RAM is ECC or not.
However, if we can determine what machine models they use (assuming they buy branded hardware), then we will know their chipsets, and from there, we should be able to deduce whether the RAM is ECC or not.
Actually when I was at NetApp we got pretty good at figuring out ECC failures. Just write a program that allocates 1GB array. Fill it with random data and compute a MD5 hash on it (you can do that fairly quickly). Now recompute the hash once every 5 minutes for a month. Run that on 125 instances. (that ends up being 1 Terabit of data btw) which makes a good detector for cosmic rays if it isn't ECC protected :-).
I did look at SoftLayer and it's still not significantly cheaper than AWS. Hetzner doesn't seem to have servers in the US, so I've already ruled them out.
Incero seems cheap, but that's the only thing I've seen about Incero. I consider Incero to be in the bargain hunting on WebHostingTalk category of providers. I'm not entirely comfortable hosting mission critical infrastructure there yet.
Incero seems cheap, but that's the only thing I've seen about Incero. I consider Incero to be in the bargain hunting on WebHostingTalk category of providers. I'm not entirely comfortable hosting mission critical infrastructure there yet.
There are probably a lot of alternatives that other people know more about than I do. Just to address a concern with Hetzner: connectivity is really good there. Last time I was in the US, I got better roundtrip times from my German server than I got from MediaTemple gs in California (though they also have some very nice features). Of course there is no going around light speed the limitation, but I'd say for a lot of projects a European server +CloudFlare is totally sufficient. In the end, it's all a tradeoff between different factors ;)
An issue with virtually all dedicated server vendors is the tendency to grossly under-equip servers with memory: My Mac Mini has 16GB (a $100 upgrade), and it is simply ridiculous that going above 4GB on a server is considered some extravagant feature the requires significant, expensive upgrades of every other component.
In VPS, memory is everything. Memory is the # of VMs they can spin up, which is directly proportional to the amount of money they're making. What you're ultimately paying for is memory. Yes, some bandwidth, but mostly memory. It's what hotel rooms are for hotels.
If we were talking about VPS servers, then sure, however we're talking about dedicated servers. What you are renting is a physical box (such as Dell R210s) sitting in a rack somewhere.
Is it possible that they might want to save money by giving you wimpy memory, because they feel that with the 32gb they give you, they could be making a lot more with something like 64 micros?
16GB of ECC memory for servers is a lot more expensive than your Mac Mini's memory. I recently spent £250 on 2x 4GB DIMMs for a Dell Poweredge server[1] (ok DDR2 is older and therefore more expensive, but still). The same configuration for my Mac Mini came in at around £50[2]
[1]http://www.crucial.com/uk/store/mpartspecs.aspx?mtbpoid=36C1...
[2]http://www.crucial.com/uk/store/mpartspecs.aspx?mtbpoid=9137...
[1]http://www.crucial.com/uk/store/mpartspecs.aspx?mtbpoid=36C1...
[2]http://www.crucial.com/uk/store/mpartspecs.aspx?mtbpoid=9137...
Actually prices for ECC memory are comparable with regular desktop RAM - both are around $300 for 32GB (4x8GB) sets:
ECC memory: http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=...
Regular memory: http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=...
ECC memory: http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=...
Regular memory: http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=...
You paid a significant premium for that older memory (a funny paradox of the industry). As P1esk mentioned, you could have gotten 32GB for around the same price. Straight from Dell, paying their inflated prices, on a new R210 it's $173 to go to 16GB of ECC memory.
I've bought a number of large servers recently (using owned servers at colocation in combination with virtual hosts for DR and geo-sharding), and always equip them with 192GB or more. The pricing of memory is so incredibly low it makes no sense otherwise, yet all of these dedicated server vendors act as if 2GB is the norm and 4GB is the advanced upgrade.
I've bought a number of large servers recently (using owned servers at colocation in combination with virtual hosts for DR and geo-sharding), and always equip them with 192GB or more. The pricing of memory is so incredibly low it makes no sense otherwise, yet all of these dedicated server vendors act as if 2GB is the norm and 4GB is the advanced upgrade.
Mind telling who's giving it? Hetzner?
The specs line up perfectly with the EX 4 from Hetzner: http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produkte_rootserver/ex4
Also checkout M5 hosting[1][2]. They have excellent customer support and I've had no issues since I started using them a few months ago. I currently have a dedicated freebsd server, for $209/month:
Xeon X3450 Quad Core, 32GB ECC RAM, 2x 500GB HD, and 2TB/month bandwidth plus a whole bunch of extra IPs allowing me to run numerous jails for hosting all sorts of sites and dev-environments. Very good machine for the price. You can still pick one up [3].
[1] http://www.m5hosting.com [2] They are also working on a an amazon AWS competitor service. [3] http://www.m5hosting.com/buynow.php
Xeon X3450 Quad Core, 32GB ECC RAM, 2x 500GB HD, and 2TB/month bandwidth plus a whole bunch of extra IPs allowing me to run numerous jails for hosting all sorts of sites and dev-environments. Very good machine for the price. You can still pick one up [3].
[1] http://www.m5hosting.com [2] They are also working on a an amazon AWS competitor service. [3] http://www.m5hosting.com/buynow.php
Why is nobody mentioning digital ocean ?
https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing
$80/month
8GB Memory 4 Cores 80GB SSD Disk 5TB Transfer
https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing
$80/month
8GB Memory 4 Cores 80GB SSD Disk 5TB Transfer
this is pretty awesome.
If cash cost is your only consideration it might make sense to look outside of AWS. One of the big issues I see is that the feature-set and global footprint of AWS is pretty much unmatched.
The really sad part (for AWS competitors) is that once you get into reserved instance pricing and spot pricing, it removes a lot of the cost difference. The competition is years behind, and getting further behind every month.
But that's looking at it from just a cash perspective. If your time is worth money (and you have funding), setting up things on AWS will save you a ton of money since you can take advantage of pretty good services like RDS, ELB, Elasticache, SQS, Route53, etc that will allow you to get your product to market faster with a smaller team.
The really sad part (for AWS competitors) is that once you get into reserved instance pricing and spot pricing, it removes a lot of the cost difference. The competition is years behind, and getting further behind every month.
But that's looking at it from just a cash perspective. If your time is worth money (and you have funding), setting up things on AWS will save you a ton of money since you can take advantage of pretty good services like RDS, ELB, Elasticache, SQS, Route53, etc that will allow you to get your product to market faster with a smaller team.
To be honest, you chose looking at the most expensive dedicated hosting provider. Also, they're just not-that-great. Their service and support staff are wonderful, but as soon as you actually need to do anything complex... good luck getting an engineer on the phone. It used to take us three or more calls to get someone higher level on the phone and we were paying five-figure type sums to them each month.
Also, we got DoS attacks all the time on their network and not one since we moved to our own hardware... Obviously take this with a grain of salt, but take the other comments to heart and actually look into other dedicated provider pricing. You might be surprised.
Also, we got DoS attacks all the time on their network and not one since we moved to our own hardware... Obviously take this with a grain of salt, but take the other comments to heart and actually look into other dedicated provider pricing. You might be surprised.
Looking from Rackspace to OVH is really going straight from one extreme to another. Softlayer is a more sensible middle-ground (though note their list prices are high, you'll almost always be able to get 2x RAM or similar).
Thank you for the recommendation, it's definitely a better deal than Rackspace for my needs, but not compelling enough for me to switch from AWS at the moment.
Try Hivelocity: http://hivelocity.net/.
They're great and cheap.
They're great and cheap.
Your comparison is bogus.
I've used a very reputable host by the name of WebNX out of Los Angeles for a long time. They blow your referenced prices out of the water.
How does this sound?
Intel Xeon 1230 v3; 32gb ram; 4x 1TB 7,200 rpm enterprise hdd w/ hardware raid 10; 20tb of outbound bandwidth; unmetered inbound bandwidth; $239
Or swap out the 4x drives for 512 ssd and 1tb 7200rpm, for $199 instead.
That v3 1230 pushes 9500 on passmark.
Back to AWS? Not a chance.
I've used a very reputable host by the name of WebNX out of Los Angeles for a long time. They blow your referenced prices out of the water.
How does this sound?
Intel Xeon 1230 v3; 32gb ram; 4x 1TB 7,200 rpm enterprise hdd w/ hardware raid 10; 20tb of outbound bandwidth; unmetered inbound bandwidth; $239
Or swap out the 4x drives for 512 ssd and 1tb 7200rpm, for $199 instead.
That v3 1230 pushes 9500 on passmark.
Back to AWS? Not a chance.
[deleted]
If you need raw performance, have a look at WebNX, they are specialized in high end dedicated servers, boxes with Xeon E5 and 64GB RAM are in the range $150-$200. I find Softlayer or Rackspace quite overpriced.
There are many other smaller hosting companies that offer good services and pricing. You just need to do some researchs.
There are many other smaller hosting companies that offer good services and pricing. You just need to do some researchs.
Don't forget to include all the free bandwidth that comes with dedicated hosting plans. With EC2, that's extra and can really make a difference to a lot of companies.
And, with dedicated hardware, you have faster storage with traditional HDD and even SSD. Both those options are faster than EC2 storage.
And, better customer service too.
And, with dedicated hardware, you have faster storage with traditional HDD and even SSD. Both those options are faster than EC2 storage.
And, better customer service too.
> A server with 1 CPU and 8GB of RAM starts at $399
No, it starts at $219. You can add more RAM to any of their hardware options. So the cheapest 1CPU-box is $159 plus $60/mo for the RAM upgrade.
By the way, Hetzner is very good, and the connectivity to the US is great. Visitors would not notice the extra couple of routing hops.
No, it starts at $219. You can add more RAM to any of their hardware options. So the cheapest 1CPU-box is $159 plus $60/mo for the RAM upgrade.
By the way, Hetzner is very good, and the connectivity to the US is great. Visitors would not notice the extra couple of routing hops.
If you just want to swing numbers around, for $500/month you can get a bare-metal Xeon with 8 cores, 32GB of RAM, and 1.6 TB of storage from Storm on Demand: https://www.stormondemand.com/servers/baremetal.html#showsig...
The startup I'm at has looked at using AWS and repeatedly decided against it based on cost. It's simply much more expensive compared to dedicated hardware when you need a single high-performance box -- and you should be able to serve a whole fuckton of traffic an 8-cpu 32GB box if you try.
The startup I'm at has looked at using AWS and repeatedly decided against it based on cost. It's simply much more expensive compared to dedicated hardware when you need a single high-performance box -- and you should be able to serve a whole fuckton of traffic an 8-cpu 32GB box if you try.
Yes, and when that box has a hardware problem you will serve a whole fuckton of nothing.
4 CPU and 7GB ram on Windows Azure is $268/month if you use Windows, and $179/month if you are using Linux. Add $120 for 1TB outbound traffic, and you are looking at $388/month Windows and $299 for Linux.
Look at softlayer. I'm moving the whole company off AWS.
IBM closed on Softlayer a few days ago. Not many people expect Softlayer to continue thriving the way it did over the years. But at the rate Softlayer grew it was apparent they were eyeing a quick exit (not too common in the dedi business).
Now it's IBM running the show at SL...
Now it's IBM running the show at SL...
> EDIT: Thanks for the suggestions to look at Softlayer. A server with 1 CPU and 8GB of RAM starts at $399, which is better than Rackspace, but not exactly orders of magnitude cheaper than the c1.xlarge I mentioned above.
You need to negotiate. The advertised prices are starting points for talking to sales, not what you really have to pay.
You can get a 2011-gen quad-core Xeon with 16GB RAM for $250/mo or thereabouts at Softlayer.
You need to negotiate. The advertised prices are starting points for talking to sales, not what you really have to pay.
You can get a 2011-gen quad-core Xeon with 16GB RAM for $250/mo or thereabouts at Softlayer.
^ An important point. I emailed SoftLayer sales when setting up Alikewise and got a much better price, around $300/mo.
This is probably still overpaying for my needs, but substantially cheaper than buying via their web interface.
Another thing I haven’t done is renegotiate in the last 2 years. Moore’s law and all, I suspect I wouldn’t save $$ but would get more horespower for the same price.
This is probably still overpaying for my needs, but substantially cheaper than buying via their web interface.
Another thing I haven’t done is renegotiate in the last 2 years. Moore’s law and all, I suspect I wouldn’t save $$ but would get more horespower for the same price.
OVH is really cheap as well:
http://www.ovh.com/ca/en/dedicated-servers/
http://www.ovh.com/ca/en/dedicated-servers/
Yeah, I've already ruled out OVH if you read the last part of my comment. The comments on Hacker News about OVH didn't really inspire confidence in OVH for more than hosting side projects, and that's not my use case.
Are you using OVH for hosting Exocortex? I checked your website and it seems to be hosted on Linode.
Are you using OVH for hosting Exocortex? I checked your website and it seems to be hosted on Linode.
OVH is not bad, most people that they cut out are people who are new, they rent 10 servers or more, start spam, then they get cut and they go on forums to complains. Since OVH is a lower cost provider, they attrack more customer like this.
On the other end, Softlayer is very reliable, I have 4 servers with them and I had nearly no problems, they have the best network as well (I got fewer network outage with Softlayer then Rackspace).
Rackspace is better if you need something managed, but they are expensive.
On the other end, Softlayer is very reliable, I have 4 servers with them and I had nearly no problems, they have the best network as well (I got fewer network outage with Softlayer then Rackspace).
Rackspace is better if you need something managed, but they are expensive.
As others have said, Rackspace is very high end. There are lots of well regarded providers in the middle that offer excellent customer service.
in case you are unaware, first, see the perf difference in my previous post, and second, the public pricing on softlayer is a price ceiling. If you are buying multiple machines, even perhaps as few as 4 or 5 a month, you can probably negotiate a nice discount and certainly if you are renting 10-20/mo. Of course they will happily sell for the price on the site.
Same here. These "amazon is so expensive and so slow" posts show up here constantly, and every time I try to get information on alternatives, and nobody has anything. A single dedicated server running in some warehouse is not a replacement for AWS. I need S3, or I need a bunch of storage devices in multiple datacenters automatically keeping the files I put on them synced. Which hosting provider is doing that again? Where is my EBS with a dedicated server warehouse? I need block device that is durable, and can be quickly and easily detached from one server and attached to another. Even the cheapest redundant iSCSI SAN setup is very expensive.
I am not paying for AWS because I am dumb, I am paying for AWS because they provide services that allow me to outsource the high durability to them. Someone show me an actual alternative please, rather than just repeating "zomghosting.biz gives you a million gigs for $20!!1".
I am not paying for AWS because I am dumb, I am paying for AWS because they provide services that allow me to outsource the high durability to them. Someone show me an actual alternative please, rather than just repeating "zomghosting.biz gives you a million gigs for $20!!1".
> I am not paying for AWS because I am dumb
...and the people who criticize AWS aren't dumb, either. AWS brings a lot to the table, and also takes a few things off the table. AWS's scaling and combo of services are both wonderful, but they come at the cost of performance and price.
Most companies don't need "click of a button"-type scaling of instances. And most people don't need all of AWS' services; replacing them with good, stable open-source software alternatives (eg., RabbitMQ for SQS, Riak for Dynamo, Postgres for RDS), while incurring a higher admin cost, is not non-trivial.
My company replaced all of our AWS instances with co-located servers a couple of years ago. Our servers were basically static; we did not rely on any dynamic scaling of instances, and since we are in Europe, we couldn't rely on datacenter distribution, either. The performance difference was extreme. The servers were cheap, but they still blew Amazon out of the water. We could easily afford two 32-core database servers within our budget, and their performance translates to a whole bunch of Amazon's fastest instances.
The up-front hardware costs were less than what we were paying per year to Amazon. We have an entire rack now, and I think we are paying something like $1,500/mo for the entire hosting package. (It may be a little more, but not much.)
Hardware maintenance costs have been negligible so far, and the redundancy built into our infrastructure and stack means we don't have to rush out the door if a box dies on us.
...and the people who criticize AWS aren't dumb, either. AWS brings a lot to the table, and also takes a few things off the table. AWS's scaling and combo of services are both wonderful, but they come at the cost of performance and price.
Most companies don't need "click of a button"-type scaling of instances. And most people don't need all of AWS' services; replacing them with good, stable open-source software alternatives (eg., RabbitMQ for SQS, Riak for Dynamo, Postgres for RDS), while incurring a higher admin cost, is not non-trivial.
My company replaced all of our AWS instances with co-located servers a couple of years ago. Our servers were basically static; we did not rely on any dynamic scaling of instances, and since we are in Europe, we couldn't rely on datacenter distribution, either. The performance difference was extreme. The servers were cheap, but they still blew Amazon out of the water. We could easily afford two 32-core database servers within our budget, and their performance translates to a whole bunch of Amazon's fastest instances.
The up-front hardware costs were less than what we were paying per year to Amazon. We have an entire rack now, and I think we are paying something like $1,500/mo for the entire hosting package. (It may be a little more, but not much.)
Hardware maintenance costs have been negligible so far, and the redundancy built into our infrastructure and stack means we don't have to rush out the door if a box dies on us.
>and the people who criticize AWS aren't dumb, either
I didn't say they were. I asked them to provide an alternative rather than pretending a single dedicated server is comparable to AWS.
>Most companies
I don't care what most companies need. I am not trying to argue, I am asking the people insisting that nobody should ever use amazon to provide a reasonable alternative or stop making sweeping generalizations.
>We could easily afford two 32-core database servers within our budget, and their performance translates to a whole bunch of Amazon's fastest instances.
Did you seriously not notice how you aren't addressing anything I said, but just repeating exactly what I pointed out wasn't relevant? I don't need more cores, I need reliable storage. What is my EBS? Until we're big enough to be running our own datacenters, there's not really a reasonable alternative that I can find. I am asking for advice, not "more cores!".
I didn't say they were. I asked them to provide an alternative rather than pretending a single dedicated server is comparable to AWS.
>Most companies
I don't care what most companies need. I am not trying to argue, I am asking the people insisting that nobody should ever use amazon to provide a reasonable alternative or stop making sweeping generalizations.
>We could easily afford two 32-core database servers within our budget, and their performance translates to a whole bunch of Amazon's fastest instances.
Did you seriously not notice how you aren't addressing anything I said, but just repeating exactly what I pointed out wasn't relevant? I don't need more cores, I need reliable storage. What is my EBS? Until we're big enough to be running our own datacenters, there's not really a reasonable alternative that I can find. I am asking for advice, not "more cores!".
Cloud Sigma (http://www.cloudsigma.com/) is the best alternative to Amazon I have found. They don't provide services like SQS, but they do have scalable storage.
I suggest you change that aggressive, pouty tone of yours. I was addressing a specific point in your comment, not disagreeing with you.
I suggest you change that aggressive, pouty tone of yours. I was addressing a specific point in your comment, not disagreeing with you.
I actually was at one point pushed hard by the CEO at a company I worked at to use EC2 because it "had to" be cheap, despite the fact I had put together numbers for him that clearly demonstrated it was between twice as expensive (purely managed servers with enough headroom to handle short term spikes) to three times expensive (managed servers loaded at 80%-90% of typical daily peak loads plus set up to use EC2 to handle peaks in emergencies). Amazon has done an amazing job in marketing and PR for AWS.
The latter is what EC2 is most useful for for me: You can cut costs of your dedicated hosting by going much closer to the wire with the knowledge you can spin up instances at EC2 (and/or other cloud providers) if you should happen to hit the front page somewhere that can drive massive traffic faster / on more transient basis than you can or want to scale up your dedicated setup.
Hetzner is great, but fully integrated providers like Softlayer is another growing threat - many providers now offer a sliding scale of some or all from colo, to managed bare metal, to "dedicated virtual" (single VM per physical server, automatically deployed in minutes or hours as a "halfway house" to cloud setups), to cloud images billed similarly to EC2. It'll be interesting to see what IBM tries to do with Softlayer...
The latter is what EC2 is most useful for for me: You can cut costs of your dedicated hosting by going much closer to the wire with the knowledge you can spin up instances at EC2 (and/or other cloud providers) if you should happen to hit the front page somewhere that can drive massive traffic faster / on more transient basis than you can or want to scale up your dedicated setup.
Hetzner is great, but fully integrated providers like Softlayer is another growing threat - many providers now offer a sliding scale of some or all from colo, to managed bare metal, to "dedicated virtual" (single VM per physical server, automatically deployed in minutes or hours as a "halfway house" to cloud setups), to cloud images billed similarly to EC2. It'll be interesting to see what IBM tries to do with Softlayer...
There is a tremendous value add from the whole AWS package, so naturally you are going to overpay a lot if you compare on raw power alone. AWS allows you to not purchase backup hardware, it allows you to shape your stack to your load profile on demand rather than purchasing hardware and potentially making a long-term commitment that is wrong, it allows you to handle load spikes very easily and inexpensively, and it allows you control everything from a robust API, and it's big and stable enough where you don't usually have to fight for and be disappointed by support: problems tend to be large and affecting everyone, or small and you just boot a new instance.
So what if you're spending $25k a year where a colo'd rack would be only $5k, that's not your major cost center in a startup (or any business for that matter). If you are utilizing the benefits of AWS it could well tip the scales in terms of not needing to have a $150k systems engineer.
So what if you're spending $25k a year where a colo'd rack would be only $5k, that's not your major cost center in a startup (or any business for that matter). If you are utilizing the benefits of AWS it could well tip the scales in terms of not needing to have a $150k systems engineer.
Are 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.
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.
This is a common misrepresentation. Given a unit, reserved instances might be price competitive, but that unit won't be performance competitive. Even with reserved instances, you're talking about 2-4x worse price/performance at the minimum (much, much worse if SSDs are involved). Not to mention the upfront cost...
Using reserved instances is the exact opposite of what anyone should be doing. The only way to get price competitive with EC2 is to go the absolute other direction: establish a baseline with dedicated/colo and use spot instances for tasks or to handle peaks.
Using reserved instances is the exact opposite of what anyone should be doing. The only way to get price competitive with EC2 is to go the absolute other direction: establish a baseline with dedicated/colo and use spot instances for tasks or to handle peaks.
Speaking of misrepresentation, 'Not to mention the upfront cost'? What are you talking about? All the pricing proposals by AWS include clear references to it, and amortise the cost over the life of the plan. It's not a hidden cost. It's not an 'extra' cost on top of 'the monthly payment you thought you were making'.
I'm not, in any way, suggesting that the pricing structure isn't 100% transparent. I'm pointing out that there's an upfront component (say $1614 for a m3.2xlarge) to the reserved instance pricing - which is likely of interest to startups. Amazon calls this an "upfront payment"...I don't think "upfront cost" is a misrepresentation.
This cost tends to be better than buying hardware, but it's much higher than what you pay for dedicated (often $0 upfront...or $25-$200).
This cost tends to be better than buying hardware, but it's much higher than what you pay for dedicated (often $0 upfront...or $25-$200).
"I'm pointing out that there's an upfront component ... which is likely of interest to startups."
Yes, this. When you're worried about cash flow, overpaying every month can seem safer than paying the upfront cost to reserve instances.
Yes, this. When you're worried about cash flow, overpaying every month can seem safer than paying the upfront cost to reserve instances.
Of course he is comparing apples and oranges, yet it is how a substantial number of people actually use AWS. Dedicated instances goes some way towards mitigating it, but for a lot of people the short term billing makes AWS look cheap, and their dedicated servers were definitively still not cheap prior to this even just looking at the cost of the instances.
A lot of people are completely blinkered when it comes to the cost of using AWS.
A lot of people are completely blinkered when it comes to the cost of using AWS.
>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.
So, you can get that $10,000/yr dedicated server for $10/yr elsewhere? What host is that. I need to check them out.
So, you can get that $10,000/yr dedicated server for $10/yr elsewhere? What host is that. I need to check them out.
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...
But this ignores the cost of paying someone to setup/maintain that rack, cost to fix the server when something goes wrong, etc.
Setup/maintenance of physical infrastructure has a cost too.
But this ignores the cost of paying someone to setup/maintain that rack, cost to fix the server when something goes wrong, etc.
Setup/maintenance of physical infrastructure has a cost too.
+1
A lot of conversation is about the cost of acquisition, but does not compare the prices of maintenance, hardware failure/outages, and recovery.
For example, with dedicated hardware and a guessed failure rate, how much does it cost, over time, to 1) replace the hardware, software, and configuration and 2) value lost (could be goodwill, could be $$$) due to outage.
With AWS using chef/puppet/salt/etc., it's trivial to boot up new nodes and down the malfunctioning ones. The value of that is super high.
A lot of conversation is about the cost of acquisition, but does not compare the prices of maintenance, hardware failure/outages, and recovery.
For example, with dedicated hardware and a guessed failure rate, how much does it cost, over time, to 1) replace the hardware, software, and configuration and 2) value lost (could be goodwill, could be $$$) due to outage.
With AWS using chef/puppet/salt/etc., it's trivial to boot up new nodes and down the malfunctioning ones. The value of that is super high.
You're acting like you can't do the same thing with dedicated hardware. On the post-install side, chef/puppet/salt/etc work just as well. On the setup/build side, dhcp, pxe, and the hands-free install setups built into every unix distro let you spin up and down machines with minimal hassle. Need a new db machine? Throw the MAC address of the new box in the db pool of your dhcp server and tell it to boot. Need to move that machine into the web server pool? Move that MAC into your web server pool and tell the box to reboot. Combine that with a mixture of hot spares, cold spares, and warm spares, and I'd still bet you'd be cheaper than AWS for any significant sized service.
from a former employer who wants to stay anonymous, ec2 bill per month: $97k peak, softlayer: $26k. 1/3 the cost, 2x the performance.
And let's not mention emr; a $15k/mo cluster in softlayer did something like 5x the performance of an emr cluster that was costing (and running!) $2k/day.
And let's not mention emr; a $15k/mo cluster in softlayer did something like 5x the performance of an emr cluster that was costing (and running!) $2k/day.
10k, 50k, heck even 100k a year should be nothing to your startup. That's the cost of one good developer. Focus your cost savings in other areas, if 100k is the kind of optimization you need to make (and you're actually spending 100k a year on virtual hardware) then you have other problems.
One good developer adds one good developer worth of value. Overpaying 100k is definitely a bad idea because you aren't getting the 100k of value.
Its a fair point, but i suspect that moving 100k of infrastructure from AWS to a colo is going to add at least 1 dev-ops / sys-admin (or sucks in 1 developers time). I'm skeptical that the cost benefit comes in until well above 100k / yr.
> Choosing EC2 and other Amazon offerings
Do you have any data on how pure S3 storage is priced relative to other solutions?
Do you have any data on how pure S3 storage is priced relative to other solutions?
Agreed. I have been running dedicated servers for years and stayed well away from Amazon due to price calculations, it's such a huge difference in price.
When I worked at start-up the lead dev seemed to be heavily bought into the hype of "cloud" hosting, so he used Engine Yard. The founders got freaked out at the cost for what was negligible traffic. We then moved to Amazon, which equally freaked them out.
If you don't have money to burn, then consider going down the standard hosting route.
When I worked at start-up the lead dev seemed to be heavily bought into the hype of "cloud" hosting, so he used Engine Yard. The founders got freaked out at the cost for what was negligible traffic. We then moved to Amazon, which equally freaked them out.
If you don't have money to burn, then consider going down the standard hosting route.
Recommended reading if your considering co-locating instead of AWS: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/10/building-servers-fo... -- It compares prices (now somewhat out of date) vs performance.
I'd say it's vastly out of date now. You can squeeze a LOT into new Dell/HP 1U/2U servers. Their R620 systems can take nearly a terabyte (768GB) of memory per server and the R720 can do the same, but with the 720XD it can do 24 drives in a single 2U space. Top that off with the newer Intel processors and you have a huge amount of hardware available to you in not a very large amount of space.
On your point about lack of pricing transparency and inability to forecast costs with AWS, check out CloudCheckr. It helped us get much better visibility into our AWS costs. I still feel like I'm overpaying with AWS, but at least I have better visibility into where and how I'm overpaying...
Why 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?
"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?
Compliance 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.
There'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.
We're going to update 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.
So 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.
Anyone else do something similar? If not, you are going to see people stick with the vendor they know best.
Amazon 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.
The FedRAMP program has also established a Joint Accreditation Board (JAB) consisting of Chief Information Officers from DoD, DHS and GSA.
Hourly billed "bare-metal" cloud servers from Softlayer seem to be cheaper still: http://www.softlayer.com/cloudlayer/computing
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and 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.
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.
incero and securedservers don't seem to offer hourly billed dedicated servers. Monthly billed dedicated servers are a different market.
Agreed - 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.
I'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?
Yes, 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.
I'm not sure how things work if you're a larger client with needs in the dozens of servers.
I 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.
People who were paying full price prior to this rebate must feel pretty annoyed right now.
First 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.
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.
It's weird how people still struggle to understand that one should always price according to what a customer is willing to pay, rather than some sort of magic formula "price = cost + socially-acceptable-profit". I thought Apple and Starbucks had made it so brazenly obvious even to the layman.
> It's weird how people still struggle to understand that one should always price according to what a customer is willing to pay, rather than some sort of magic formula "price = cost + socially-acceptable-profit".
What one should do depends on one's goals. To maximize profits, and ignoring the costs involved in doing so, one should charge each customer what that individual customer is willing to pay. Approximating this is a big motivation most market segmentation schemes.
Of course, doing so naively can maximize short-term profits while negatively affecting goodwill, which can then hurt long term profits.
Also, even ignoring goodwill, pricing to maximize returns from the current market for a good or service can limit the ability to develop new markets for it.
What one should do depends on one's goals. To maximize profits, and ignoring the costs involved in doing so, one should charge each customer what that individual customer is willing to pay. Approximating this is a big motivation most market segmentation schemes.
Of course, doing so naively can maximize short-term profits while negatively affecting goodwill, which can then hurt long term profits.
Also, even ignoring goodwill, pricing to maximize returns from the current market for a good or service can limit the ability to develop new markets for it.
>What one should do depends on one's goals. To maximize profits, and ignoring the costs involved in doing so, one should charge each customer what that individual customer is willing to pay.
There you have the American university system in a nutshell, though you might have to substitute "able" for "willing".
There you have the American university system in a nutshell, though you might have to substitute "able" for "willing".
It works the other way too. About every other week there is an article or comment posted here on HN that talks about how artists or authors should be able to charge what they want and people should pay it purely because that's what the creator values their work at.
I don't find it weird, but I do find it weird _on Hacker News_.
Especially given the rhetoric about how 'economics' drives things down to the marginal cost, it's not super surprising, as a general rule. People assume that competition won't allow prices to get too much higher than costs.
Some people here may find this ironic, but I always remember this rule because I'm (depending on the day) a Marxist.
Especially given the rhetoric about how 'economics' drives things down to the marginal cost, it's not super surprising, as a general rule. People assume that competition won't allow prices to get too much higher than costs.
Some people here may find this ironic, but I always remember this rule because I'm (depending on the day) a Marxist.
exactly. 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.
Just one reason competition is generally good for consumers, even though on a macro level one could argue that competition is inefficient.
(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...
Yeah, like we've heard for years, this is coming real soon, just around the corner, here before we know it, any day now...
I 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?
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?
My 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.
Likewise. 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.
We're planning to (eventually) utilize Amazon to temporarily add capacity when necessary, but it will never be our primary hosting solution.
That 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.
Wow. 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.
Those servers run our ElasticSearch index so move TB of data around inside the network and out to customers. Our actual crawlers could happily sip from a 5mbps pipe.
Yep. 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.
with amazon you're paying for software, not hardware. big difference.
Now I wander if Heroku prices will follow or if they'll decide to just pocket the difference themselves.
Does heroku run on the dedicated servers?
Dedicated being different from 100% utilization reserved servers
http://aws.amazon.com/dedicated-instances/ vs http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/ (which did not get 80% cuts)
Dedicated being different from 100% utilization reserved servers
http://aws.amazon.com/dedicated-instances/ vs http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/ (which did not get 80% cuts)
I'd think they would employ dedicated instances which they then subdivide to keep their customers as isolated as possible.
Aren't dedicated instances only available in VPCs? In that case Heroku would not use them as all Heroku machines are public.
You can easily make a VPC fully public, or have fully public subdivisions.
I highly doubt Heroku pays list price for their servers. Any public EC2 price change is probably mostly irrelevant to them, other than as a baseline for their negotiations.
Heroku don't use these.
Have 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.
Disclosure: 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
We've dropped our prices a number of times, the lastest a few months ago:
https://blog.engineyard.com/2013/announcing-lower-pricing
And yet hosting a small app on engineyard (with hopes of hitting it big) is still infinitely more expensive than Heroku beyond the 20 day trial .
"infinitely", cool.
We've plenty of customers who migrate to us when they "hit it big". It's no secret that that's where Engine Yard has been positioned for a long time.
The point of us dropping prices was so we could pass value onto our customers.
We've plenty of customers who migrate to us when they "hit it big". It's no secret that that's where Engine Yard has been positioned for a long time.
The point of us dropping prices was so we could pass value onto our customers.
Yep, infinitely: 0 vs. ~$40 right? Not sure why you downvoted.
One would think why Digital Ocean is first to come to my mind.
I 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.
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.
That 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.
It 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.
Prices 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/ex10
https://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produkte_rootserver/ex4
https://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produkte_rootserver/ex10
I'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.
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.
Just 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.
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.
There 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.
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.
i host a few sites with moderate traffic on an ex10 server. I can't remember of any network issues. Current uptime:
12:13:14 up 183 days, 21:23, 2 users, load average: 0.51, 0.55, 0.49
The problem is unreliability of hardware. When one of the hard disks broke in the previous server, it was faster to setup a new server to transfer everything rather than waiting for the repair.
12:13:14 up 183 days, 21:23, 2 users, load average: 0.51, 0.55, 0.49
The problem is unreliability of hardware. When one of the hard disks broke in the previous server, it was faster to setup a new server to transfer everything rather than waiting for the repair.
I concur with the unreliability of hardware. Back in January a production Hetzer box of mine saw both HDDs die at the same time. That somewhat killed the redundancy benefit of RAID.
That said, it did spur a month-long effort to truly revamp my dusty backup-and-restore process so I'm in a much better position for when it happens again.
That said, it did spur a month-long effort to truly revamp my dusty backup-and-restore process so I'm in a much better position for when it happens again.
You're telling me swapping HDDs and letting RAID rebuild is slower than setting up the server again?!
A failed HDD should NEVER, EVER, bring a server down.
A failed HDD should NEVER, EVER, bring a server down.
i should have mentioned that both disks reporting errors. The DNS change required less downtime than the downtime of backing up everything and setting up the servers from the start.
I had a Hetzner server and was very very satisfied both by the performance and the price. Does anyone know a comparable offering in the US, for people who want servers there? I think I heard OVH?
Yes OVH should give you the same sort of things, and they now have an american datacenter (you can chose which datacenter you want your servers to be in when ordering)
Thank you, the prices look comparable. Does anyone have experience with them? How are they?
OVH are great as long as you don't need to get in touch with them - If one of their servers break, you're better migrating to a new box than trying to fix it.
Same experience here. This is why we always have more servers up than we need to. One time it took us almost a week of mailing before they replaced a broken hard drive. But they have to save money somewhere.
I'm strongly advising against cheep providers like ovh or hetzner without proper redundancy.
I'm strongly advising against cheep providers like ovh or hetzner without proper redundancy.
Is there a Hetzner equivalent in the US or Canada?
I've been keeping my eyes peeled for one and.. there are actually several. http://netdepot.com/ is the one I've come closest to ordering from so far but I haven't yet done so. I like that they do "buy downs" where you can pay for extra hardware up front though. It's not quite as cheap as Hetzner but it's not miles away.
Others on my radar are https://hivelocity.net and http://www.100tb.com/ - at the VPS level, http://buyvm.net/ and http://prgmr.com/xen/ are both cheap for the quality you appear to get (but I can't yet vouch for this directly).
Others on my radar are https://hivelocity.net and http://www.100tb.com/ - at the VPS level, http://buyvm.net/ and http://prgmr.com/xen/ are both cheap for the quality you appear to get (but I can't yet vouch for this directly).
The "buydown" option provides a nice alternative between colocation and dedicated server. With initial setup fee of $1300, you can get a server with similar specs to m2.2xlarge + 4000 IOPS for just $139 a month, while not having to worry about replacing failed hardware parts and resource contention. Sweet.
Thanks for the links. Not sure if any of them fit the bill for me, sadly - I need at least one box with large RAIDed SSDs for a database. Hetzner seems to offer this.
OVH has very similar prices and you can peep at their http://status.ovh.com/ to see how they have been going with uptime.
Yeah, I've been very tempted, but I've unfortunately seen some horror stories about them that have given me pause. Have you given them a try? If so, would you run a business on them?
We have nearly 100 servers in the Montreal BHS datacentre. Been very happy so far. The web GUI is fairly buggy and they have no automatic billing so you have to manually renew each server but they tell me this will be fixed soon.
Good enough for me, thanks. Though not being able to pull together something basic like automatic billing is pretty worrying :-/
We're happy with OVH (we have some boxes in Montreal and some in their France location) - good prices, no issues after a year+ usage.
OVH actually does NOT have very similar prices. Hetzner is by far the cheapest dedicated hosting that I know of.
So, I have to be cool with having terrible reliability, no durability, no services I rely on (SQS, S3, EBS), increased latency for my users (our userbase is 99% north american), and extended downtimes anytime anything goes wrong with hardware, networking, etc? Maybe there's a reason for the price difference?
Dude, I thought you kept everything on a single "big iron" server? Why are you using AWS?
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Can 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.
AWS recently released a whitepaper describing the best practices for doing just this: http://media.amazonwebservices.com/AWS_NoSQL_MongoDB.pdf [PDF]
Honestly? I wouldn't. My first choice would be to use a service like https://www.mongohq.com to manage it for you.
The 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-usin...
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-usin...
It chocks me that no one mentions that these instances run on dirty coal plants.
What should they run on? Unicorn sparkles?
Quick google: http://www.idownloadblog.com/2012/09/14/icloud-solar-farm-ne...
Solar or wind.
Solar or wind.
Have you actually read the greenpeace report? Amazon uses less coal than most cloud companies.
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There 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.
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.
In 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!
Cool, I hope this helps startups that need HIPAA, PCI, and other compliance requirements.
“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".
What a hypocrisy. This should be read as "polices require that an adequate and predictable I/O performance could be provided".
This is usually a security requirement for big corporations with paranoid legal departments, not a performance requirement.
They market their Provisioned IOPS for that purpose.
There 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.
That 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.
I 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.
Source: 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.
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.
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.