

EC2 is Basically One Big Rip-Off - cmer
http://blog.carlmercier.com/2012/01/05/ec2-is-basically-one-big-scam/

======
jeromegn
I agree that performances are bad on EC2. That's because of the overhead of
virtualization.

It's not a "Big Scam" though, it's just bad performances. It still has lots of
pros, instant deployment to name only one.

~~~
cmer
I agree that it is much more flexible. However, is it really worth paying
10-20 times more? I'm not sure.

The price I got at Joe's is not even "that" cheap. You can get a MUCH faster
box at Softlayer for not much more, making EC2 look even more pathetic.

Performance/price wise, I think EC2 is definitely a scam. The flexibility
aspect of it is what makes the comparison more difficult.

~~~
mooism2
EC2 is a scam? Are you accusing Amazon of fraud?

~~~
cmer
Read the article. I'm simply saying that EC2 is at least 10 times more
expensive than the competition but people don't seem to realize it. The
performance on EC2 is basically equivalent to a 10 year old crappy computer.

~~~
mooism2
Yeah, I read it before you changed the title.

I agree that EC2 isn't value for money if you're looking to rent a server for
a month at a time.

------
mooism2
Flagged for a linkbait title that isn't supported by the body of the article.

EDIT: Title has been changed to something more reasonable, so I've removed my
flag.

~~~
cmer
I think my choice of word was wrong, so I changed it. Thanks for removing your
flag.

------
pixeloution
I'm the total opposite of a server guy, but I think your tests may be in some
way flawed. At work we have a site that got high traffic for a few months on a
dedicated box @ softlayer -- and it keeled over, unable to handle the outgoing
data.

Moving the site to a EC2 large completely removed the problem.

I realize this is completely anecdotal without much detail (well I know the
softlayer box runs about $200 a month, so it can't be their worst thing) but
it does make me wonder.

~~~
cmer
That's very odd. James Golick of Fetlife had the opposite experience with
Softlayer (link to his video in my post).

I currently manage ~40 servers on EC2 and I'm confident that I could get away
with just 5 "decent" dedicated boxes. EC2 gets expensive quickly, but most and
foremost, managing so many instances is quite a headache.

------
jensnockert
Wait... you're migrating from EC2 to someone selling computing time on really
old CPUs? Sure, EC2 isn't fast, but it is somewhat reliable, which is worth
something.

A sledgehammer is a 9 year old CPU (from 2003), and even if it was 10x faster
than the Amazon instance, the chance that it will survive for 4-5 years more
is quite low. Paying for really old hardware is a bad idea, generally.

~~~
cmer
I'm not migrating from EC2, this is for a personal pet project where price
matters.

However, you just proved my point. If a 9 year old CPU performs 10 times
better than a m1.small for the same price, something's not right.

That said, it's not true to say that an EC2 instance is more reliable than an
old dedicated box. We've had countless "degraded node" notifications over the
years for our EC2 instances. For example, if a network adapter fails in the
physical machine, even if it does not affect your instance, Amazon will shut
it down. So in a way, many more things can go wrong.

~~~
thunfischbrot
At the same time you just pointed to one of the flaws in your argument that
EC2 is overpriced: You are comparing two services which are very different.
It's even right there in the name: Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. EC2 allows
for elasticity and scalability and therefore is not very strong in the pet-
project market. If you want to talk about a rip-off, compare it with Microsoft
Azure, Google App Engine or some other services and identify in your post on
which grounds you compare them. A dedicated server has very little in common
with an EC2 instance.

I bet you could buy a laptop for less than 100 USD, install your LAMP server
on it an connect it to any leased line to get superior performance to an EC2
instance. But you lose all the advantages EC2 was created to have.

