

Amazon EC2 vs Dedicated Servers - justatech

We currently run 4 dedicated web servers and are thinking of migrating to Amazon EC2. What are the benefits vs drawbacks - in terms of costs and performance. We use 2 of our servers for serving about 3 to 5 million unique visitors a month, and 2 of the servers as database servers. We do not really need scalability benefits as we are happy with performance. We are worried that our performance - in terms of disk I/O and latency may suffer if we move to Amazon. Also, our costs may be higher. Any ideas or insights would be appreciated,
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benologist
You've listed a bunch of reasons why you shouldn't, but no reason why you're
considering moving at all.

What do you hope to gain from the migration?

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justatech
While we are worried that performance may be lower and costs higher - we are
not sure if this would be the case. If we can get the same performance for a
comparable cost (say within 10 to 15%) of what we are currently paying, we
would prefer EC2 for two reasons 1) Redundancy - in case we have a problem it
would be easy to restore instances and be back up online quickly 2)
Flexibility - as we occasionally (2 or 3 times a year) do have peak traffic
loads when we could use more servers.

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Travis
A hybridized approach may work for you in those higher periods. Depending on
your bottlenecks, it may be possible to spin up ec2 instances during your high
load periods that will cover your necessary additional capacity. (Esp if you
are bw or RAM limited, you can setup asset servers on ec2 and just change DNS
pointers to enable them.)

One other advantage is your future scalability, as well: as your site grows,
you'll need to "resize" your dedicated instances. If that is something you
need, then that's another advantage (really, it's continuous ability to scale
versus discrete scaling events, e.g. upgrading a dedi server).

That said, if you have a good dedi provider, upgrading those shouldn't be too
tough.

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mohangk
Our experience with cloud servers (gogrid, voxel) is I/O is the Achilles heel,
hence if you're doing I/O intensive stuff like database batch processing or
big queries (where not everything can be in memory in the same time) - you
might be prone to issues. The lack of ability to guarantee I/O throughput
means there are times that things will move a lot slower, and without digging
in you sometimes won't even know the cause. We try to run all our DB servers
on dedicated hardware because of that.

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briandoll
Every application and environment is different. The great thing about cloud
providers is that they are so easy to get up and running. Test it out!
Benchmark your app in both environments and compare how it performs. Weight
the costs/benefits of both solutions (not just in terms of performance, but
also in maintenance, friction to change, etc.) and go from there.

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bdheeman
Don't forget to evaluate/review security and, or privacy of your data and
applications in public cloud computing environment ...

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SemanticFog
The most important reason to move to EC2 is flexibility -- do you need to
quickly add servers, then later turn them off?

If you have very predictable needs, and already have dedicated servers
running, then there's no clear reason to change.

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ryanto
You mention that there are 2-3 times a year when you have peak traffic load.
Do you exactly know when those times take place? If not, EC2 is great for
automatically spinning up new servers when your load gets too high.

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justatech
Yes, we do know generally when the traffic will peak and can plan for it.

