
Easy Amazon EC2 Instance Comparison - benhomie
http://www.ec2instances.info
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stephenr
I still don’t understand this industry’s obsession with predefined fixed
limits on unrelated resources.

Just because I want lots of RAM, why do I necessarily need lots of disk and/or
lots of transfer?

Or vice versa, why do I need to pay for lots of tranfer and RAM to get lots of
disk?

I get that AWS has separate billing for data, but they still tie CPU, RAM and
Disk space together, as do most “traditional” VPS hosts.

And even more confusing to me, is why anyone with any sense would pay for
these things?

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elithrar
> I still don’t understand this industry’s obsession with predefined fixed
> limits on unrelated resources.

1\. It keeps their billing simpler. They would have to (or otherwise make it
up elsewhere) charge different rates for different resources, making it
relatively confusing + increasing support costs.

2\. Much easier to forecast resources. If you know that you can fit X
instances of type Y on a box, or W instances of type Z, it's easier to
understand when/where you will need more hardware.

It's not perfect, I agree, but if an ad-hoc VPS product was profitable I'm
sure we'd have seen it by now.

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asharp
It's more of a capability thing. If you're running, say, Piston cloud you're
using ceph over ethernet to back your disks, so you can easily decouple disk
usage and ram usage. If you're stuck using local disks (ie.
rackspace/joyent/linode/amazon to a point/etc.), then it's a lot harder to
provide that sort of product.

That being said there are providers out there that sell it, and have been for
years.

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stephenr
I’m very aware there are, and we use one of them.

How is it harder (technically. I realise billing is more complex)? You have
some software that provisions a VPS with the requested resource limits.

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semanticist
I think it's more useful to be able to build up a more real-world deployment
with storage costs, etc all built in, like you can do with PlanForCloud.

That gives you a monthly/yearly final number, which is more useful for
comparing against other 'cloud' providers, or for making the point that often
it's cheaper to use standard VM or dedicated server providers.

This tool is great, but only if you're only looking at EC2, and I think that's
a mistake these days.

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okrasz
Another site that is also helpful to make provider comparisons is
[http://www.cloudorado.com/](http://www.cloudorado.com/)

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wanghq
In case anyone wants to estimate the cost of other services. AWS simple
monthly calculator:
[http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/calc5.html](http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/calc5.html)

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iconara
Here's a different service I made that includes other regions, continously
updated spot instance prices, and a few other nice features:
[http://ec2pricing.iconara.info/](http://ec2pricing.iconara.info/)

It's also available as an API: [http://ec2pricing.herokuapp.com/api/v1/eu-
west-1/](http://ec2pricing.herokuapp.com/api/v1/eu-west-1/)

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coolrhymes
AWS has a full blown calculator for every service they provide, not just EC2.
They give you pricing by monthly, upfront cost [for reserved instances] etc.

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

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rspeer
These costs don't include the cost of provisioned IOPS, right? Without
provisioned IOPS, the I/O performance is going to range from "very low" to
"low", not "low" to "very high".

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AsymetricCom
Provisioned IOPS is just a method for other large corporations to donate to
AWS without C-level approval.

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immad
what do you mean by donate?

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AsymetricCom
As in I give you this money and you make sure I can keep giving you money.

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aristidb
Am I missing something or does this not include options for the reserved
instances? Because _that_ is the part of the EC2 pricing that is most
confusing to me.

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sitkack
Reserved instances are most likely for people not like us. You should be
modeling your apps to take advantage of spot pricing not reserved.

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velodrome
Is there a reason you specifically want spot pricing over reserved? Do you
save more money?

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grosskur
Yes, spot instances are significantly cheaper than even reserved instances.
For example, a 3-year heavy utilization cc2.8xlarge instance costs $0.49/hr
(with $10K up-front!), whereas its costs only $0.27/hr on the spot market
(with nothing up-front). Your spot instance could run happily for several days
or it could get killed 5 minutes later if there's a price spike. You have to
accept uncertainty in exchange for the cheaper price.

Combining reserved instances with spot instances in the same pool can be a
good strategy because you get cost-savings while also maintaining a minimum
capacity. You can also spread spot instances over different availability
zones, since spot price varies across zones.

FYI, I created an app that charts spot prices over time across various
instance types, regions, and availability zones:

[http://ec2price.com/](http://ec2price.com/)

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bvancea
I just started using AWS yesterday and was pretty annoyed by the really
counter-intuitive AWS website. I've been using other IAAS before, but AWS's
information is all over the place.

Thanks a lot, really helpful for me atleast!

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aquark
Having an option to show the effective monthly rate (incl. the amortized up
front cost) for light/medium/heavy reserved instances would be great ... I
always end up creating a spreadsheet for those.

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immad
This is useful but it doesn't cover reserved or any IOPs which is
unfortunately.

AWS in general makes pricing opaque and hard to reason about, more simple
tools like this would be useful.

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shrike
There is also [http://www.awsnow.info/](http://www.awsnow.info/), now with
RESTful access to pricing.

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zacwitte
This is nice, but can you add the machine name (ie. c1.xlarge) and add costs
scenarios for reserved instances?

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kudu
The question is, why would you use EC2 instead of DigitalOcean?

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morgo
AWS has a lot of managed infrastructure components like RDS, EMR, S3.

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jokull
ELB, CloudFront, SQS, SES ... it’s nice to have those things at your disposal
even though alternatives exist. Consolidated billing, fewer accounts to log
into (admin overhead) etc.

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geuis
I can't select any of the menu options on my phone.

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philfreo
Please add other regions, especially us-west-1.

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yeleti
always wanted this. ended up putting numbers in excel. thanks.

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ye
It would be nice to have a column for a 30.44 day cost (average month).

EC2 is ridiculously expensive, considering the prices at Linode, Hetzner,
DigitalOcean, OVH, LeaseWeb and 100tb.

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eloff
Just having checked out the companies you mentioned, they are cheaper for
small-midsize hosting solutions.

For running large memory and bandwidth hungry servers they just can't deliver.
On Amazon you can get 256GB of ram with dedicated 10GBps clustered networking.
None of the options you listed can go above 1GBps and it won't be dedicated
(you'll get a 1GBps port onto a shared network, and you'll be at the mercy of
the traffic conditions inside their data center.)

Amazon also has a huge amount of cloudy solutions which is not to be sneezed
at.

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ye
This one allows up to 384GB RAM:

[http://www.hetzner.de/hosting/produkte_rootserver/dx290](http://www.hetzner.de/hosting/produkte_rootserver/dx290)

And it costs a fraction of EC2, which would cost you $2556 for 30.44 days.

I could get 10 servers with 1 Gbit each, and it will still be cheaper than
EC2.

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eloff
Ok, that's interesting. It's non-obvious that it was possible from their site.
But the network is still a major problem. 10 servers @ 1gbit are not equal to
1 @ 10gbit depennding on your use case. In my case the database is network
limited, and it's extremely not-nice to have to partition it horizontally.

