AWS should have shaved down the cost of the dedicated unit as well, if we are in cost cutting mode. Those prices would look very different if they just used some plain jane boxes from 100tb.com or leaseweb.
In order for AWS to make sense, you need to utilize the hourly billing. If you use EC2 and leave you server on 24/7, you are going to be paying more for less powerful hardware than you could with dedicated. Yes, they have a fancy datacenter and instant provisioning and cool backups. You are still paying more. Way more in some cases.
*This does not apply for tiny websites. If your hosting bill is 100$ or less a month, amazon is likely fine for you and maybe the most effective cost saver. Once you go above that mark, Its almost always more effective to be on dedicated unless you are one of the very few people who has truely hourly based service (Think, a seti@home where you only crunch data once a month) - Any normal "website" will do better with dedicated.
Finally, to summarize the above. EC2's main, most important, if-you-arent-using-it-you-are-doing-it-wrong, feature is HOURLY BILLING. If you dont constantly switch on and off from different sizes (and you spend a decent amount of cash) then dedicated is likely better for you.
Dont get me wrong, EC2 is great. But use it for overflow. Or use it for the bells and whistles. Or use it because you have more cash and you would rather not deal with the issues and you like simpledb and yadda yadda yadda. Use it for whatever reason you like. Just dont use it because its cheaper. Because its not.
"*This does not apply for tiny websites. If your hosting bill is 100$ or less a month, amazon is likely fine for you and maybe the most effective cost saver."
I was going to say this. Using an US-East micro instance reserved for 3 years is cheap as hell for my screen/irssi and occasional VPN needs. The cost per month is something like the change I currently have in my pocket.
Actually, for this precise use case, it might well be among the cheapest.
With a 3-year reserved instance, using the "intensive usage" pricing (since it's always on), and in the cheapest availability zone. I get a price of 6.42$/month.
I guess in practice, even for an personal thing, around 10GB of storage would be required (1$) (does the installed OS counts towards this number ?).
Add 10GB of transfered data (1$), as a vpn/screen server is unlikely to have huge amounts of incoming data.
The final price is 8.42$. Which, for a 600MB ram server, is quite competitive. If I didn't forget something.
This is about the only use case where I would recommend AWS, though. Starting at ~25/30$, there are way better alternatives (including cheap dedicated). And if you need more bandwidth, cheap VPS tend to come with 20 or 100GB/month at least. But you'd get less RAM.
For my ssh proxy needs (primarily, routing around geo-IP locating me in the UK, and instead appearing from a US IP), 600MB is overkill. As a result, I pay 36 USD a year for a Xen virtualized box with 128MB ram and allegedly 300GB data a month (though I never get anywhere near that). That's 3 USD a month. And if I was buying a new similar server today, I could probably get something better and cheaper.
I thought about that when I moved (in progress) to my own 'place on the net'. I went with a different provider, took the name from a recent discussion about cheap VPS solutions.
I have 2 cores (well, shared box..), 1GB of ram, 20 GB of hdd. I don't quite remember what option I selected for bandwidth, but the hoster's TOS say 'if you exceed your bandwidth limit, we'll throttle you to 10MBit. No additional charges apply'. Uhm.. Fine.
I pay 11 EUR, which is awfully close to your price without any commitment (I can cancel every month) and with better specs.
We are in the process moving our dedicated (always on) servers to EC2 as well. Why? Because even so it is more expensive (almost double in some cases), we compensate this extra cost with reduced admin costs and increased developer productivity (need a server clone for testing? Done in a minute!).
I am convinced that the future of web hosting is AWS style.
EC2 is much cheaper than the kind of hosting deals that large enterprise signs, which are not flexible either. That is one of Amazon's really big markets.
Is AWS really that great for startups (under $100/month hosting)? What about Linode et al? AFAIK, AWS is min $70/month to host a regular dynamic website, whereas Linode starts at $19/month. With intelligent caching (ESI, etc), that $19 can handle 500+ req/sec. Or say 20k+ req/sec for static files (i.e full-page cached sites). Sure there are limitations, but I'd imagine Linode/Slicehost/Rackspace (unmanaged) being better for statups who run regular dynamic websites (with little need for serious elasticity). These VPS providers have load balancing, great communities, good doco, month-to-month contracts, etc.
Admittedly, this isn't my field, so I'd love to hear from someone in-the-know about whether Linode is on par with AWS with regard to most startups (who don't need the extra services Amazon provide over VPS providers).
"Server" is an euphemism. The micro's run on the leftover capacity of their host. This means they're not suited to tasks that need any kind of responsiveness (as implied by the word "server").
They're meant for long-term crunching such as video transcoding or batch-jobs. And in most cases you'll want to have a lot more than one because a single micro has about the throughput of a modern android phone...
One of the things that frustrates me the most about AWS is that there are getting to be too many options. Don't get me wrong, love being able to reserve instances, i love being able to size them, but having to also gague if my system is heavy v's light utilization on top of all this gets a little annoying.
Maybe i'm being unreasonable? I would say I am (honestly) if it were not for the fact that if you purchase a 3 year medium utilization instance, and suddenly you want to switch to a heavy...DING there goes your 3 year cost again.
We love AWS, but things like upfront fees that we have to pay, which then have to be re-paid if our business changes really bother me.
In order for AWS to make sense, you need to utilize the hourly billing. If you use EC2 and leave you server on 24/7, you are going to be paying more for less powerful hardware than you could with dedicated. Yes, they have a fancy datacenter and instant provisioning and cool backups. You are still paying more. Way more in some cases.
*This does not apply for tiny websites. If your hosting bill is 100$ or less a month, amazon is likely fine for you and maybe the most effective cost saver. Once you go above that mark, Its almost always more effective to be on dedicated unless you are one of the very few people who has truely hourly based service (Think, a seti@home where you only crunch data once a month) - Any normal "website" will do better with dedicated.
Finally, to summarize the above. EC2's main, most important, if-you-arent-using-it-you-are-doing-it-wrong, feature is HOURLY BILLING. If you dont constantly switch on and off from different sizes (and you spend a decent amount of cash) then dedicated is likely better for you.
Dont get me wrong, EC2 is great. But use it for overflow. Or use it for the bells and whistles. Or use it because you have more cash and you would rather not deal with the issues and you like simpledb and yadda yadda yadda. Use it for whatever reason you like. Just dont use it because its cheaper. Because its not.