

New EC2 M3 Instance Sizes and Lower Prices for S3 and EBS - pentium10
http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2014/01/21/announcing-new-amazon-ec2-m3-instance-sizes-and-lower-prices-for-amazon-s3-and-amazon-ebs/

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manishsharan
One of the things I hate most about AWS is their refusal to give monthly
pricing for EC2 instances like Digital Ocean. Instead I have to use a web form
to estimate my monthly/quarterly costs. One of the reasons I might move to DO
is that I can do back of the envelope calculations so easily when projecting
my costs. And bandwidth costs.

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ShaneOG
Check out [http://ec2instances.info](http://ec2instances.info)

It will be even better when this PR is merged (soon)
[https://github.com/powdahound/ec2instances.info/pull/37](https://github.com/powdahound/ec2instances.info/pull/37)

~~~
_delirium
It's be cool if the 'annually' version could also take into account reserved
pricing, since doing the 1-year reserved thing would be the sensible option if
you wanted to use a machine as an always-on VPS-style box. E.g. the m1.small
instance is $797.16 annually (what the page currently reports), but with
1-year "heavy utilization" reservation it ends up being a more reasonable
$291.64 (including both the cost of reservation and the instance cost).

~~~
singlow
The calculator provided by Amazon does have the option of factoring in the
Reserve Pricing and will give you the monthly and annual charges as separate
line items.

[http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/calc5.html](http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/calc5.html)

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JoshGlazebrook
Are outgoing bandwidth costs ever going to drop? It just seems crazy that
DigitalOcean can provide you 1TB of bandwidth in their $5 plan while 1TB on
AWS ($0.12/GB) is $122.76 (first GB is free).

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ghshephard
Transit costs an ISP (who buys 40+ gigabit circuits) about $1/megabit @ 95th
percentile. 1 Terabyte is about 3 megabits/second fully loaded for a month -
So, presuming that DO has to pay for their pipe, that 1 TB costs them $3.

Amazon is probably charging a bit much, but DO's costs are probably
unsustainable if people actually used their 1TB (much like any service that
offers people a "huge amount" with the hope that nobody actually uses it.

~~~
bluedino
Exactly how Dreamhost/Hostgator can offer 'unlimited
diskspace/bandwidth/puppies' for $6 a month or whatever.

~~~
pgrote
Two ways:

1) They oversell their capacity. 2) Their terms of service agreement prohibit
anything that would actually let you us unlimited.

[http://webmasterfaqs.org/is-unlimited-web-hosting-a-
scam/](http://webmasterfaqs.org/is-unlimited-web-hosting-a-scam/)

~~~
smackfu
Yeah. Dreamhost kindly asked me to switch to their VPS service a few years ago
when I was using too much CPU.

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netcraft
so this brings them in line or lower than google's cloud storage
[https://cloud.google.com/products/cloud-
storage/](https://cloud.google.com/products/cloud-storage/)

Great to see this competition. Does anyone know if s3 and gcs are comparable
to azure's locally redundant or geographically redundant storage? The new
pricing is basically in the middle of the two for azure.

~~~
mjn
S3 is locally redundant; buckets live in a specific region you put them in.
You could roll your own geographically redundant storage by mirroring the same
data into buckets in two or more regions, though. With the new pricing, two-
region mirroring would run you between $0.136/GB/mo and $0.17/GB/mo, depending
on whether you also wanted local redundancy within each region or were using
"reduced redundancy storage" for each copy.

Joyent's pricing is slightly better if you want to roll your own multi-region
storage:
[http://www.joyent.com/products/manta/pricing](http://www.joyent.com/products/manta/pricing)
(Also comes with an interesting Unix-compute service where you can submit jobs
to run over the data where it lives, rather than having to download it into a
VPS to process, which I find more interesting than the storage itself.)

~~~
hemancuso
US Standard S3 region is geographically redundant. It routes to both Northern
Virginia and "facilities in the Pacific Northwest." This redundancy is why it
does not provide read-after-write consistency like the other regions.

~~~
mjn
Ah interesting, thanks! I didn't see that meta-region mentioned on the Pricing
page ([http://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/](http://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/)).
Is it priced the same as the two lower-cost U.S. regions (N. Virginia /
Oregon) that it apparently overlays?

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mnordhoff
Oregon (us-west-2) is a separate region. I don't know if the US Standard
"Pacific Northwest" location actually is in Oregon, but even if it is, it's
classified separately.

us-east-1 _is_ the S3 "US Standard" meta-region. For all other services, us-
east-1 is just good old "US East (N. Virginia)". For S3, the two names refer
to the same thing. It uses the us-east-1 pricing, no matter where your data is
physically located, since it is us-east-1.

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aioprisan
m3.medium only has 4GB of storage? Is that a typo? Why not the standard 8GB?
That'll make it unusable for my AMIs. The m3.medium is $0.113/hr for 3 ECU and
3.75 GB RAM, while the m3.large is $0.225/hr for 6.5 ECUs and 7.5 GB RAM but
32 GB of SSD storage.

~~~
jeffbarr
That's the correct number. The complete list of instance types and sizes lives
as [http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-
types/](http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/)

~~~
helper
Is that the size of the root volume?

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jmelloy
They have a concept of an "ephemeral" volume, which is a disk mounted on the
same rack. It goes away every time you reboot, but is useful for caching or
file transfers, because it's the fastest disk you have access to. In day to
day usage it's not actually that important.

You can have as much EBS/SAN data as you're willing to pay for, so everything
important gets stored on that.

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manas2004
There is no small instance type in any current generation instance types
anymore.

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will_lam
Cool - signed up for AWS S3 last night and woke up to this news :)

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velodrome
I would love to have SSD-based EBS?

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acdha
How would that be different from provisioned IOPS – simply having a limit
greater than 4K IOPs?

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velodrome
I guess it is kind of the same but a higher upper limit?

Rackspace Block Storage vs EBS (provisioned) - Page 73:
[http://c1776742.cdn.cloudfiles.rackspacecloud.com/downloads/...](http://c1776742.cdn.cloudfiles.rackspacecloud.com/downloads/pdfs/CloudBlockStorage_Benchmark.pdf)

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DrJ
remember this all starts February 1st :D.

