
Amazon EC2 Instance Comparison - beaucronin
http://www.ec2instances.info/
======
moonboots
There has been a lot of discussion on HN about dedicated hosting at Hetzner vs
Amazon, and while they offer different pros and cons, Amazon appears to be a
lot more expensive for comparable or even worse specs. Here's a comparison of
two servers that have roughly comparable specs, Amazon High-Memory Double
Extra Large and Hetzner ex8s:

    
    
      cpu:
      hetzner: Intel Xeon E3-1275 (4 physical cores)
      ec2: 4 virtual cores (13 "ecus" where each ecu is ~ 2007 xeon core)
    
      ram:
      hetzner: 32 GB ECC
      ec2: 34 GB (previous commenters have speculated that it's non-ecc because Amazon only mentions otherwise for compute units)
    
      disk:
      hetnzer: customizable, cheapest is 3TB disk or 120 GB SSD for 15 euros/month
      ec2: 850 GB (ephermeral)
    
      network:
      hetzner: 100 Mbit (incoming free, 10TB outgoing free, 7 euros/TB after)
      ec2: unknown speed (incoming free, $0.12/GB outgoing, $120/TB)
    
      price:
      hetzner: ~$265 for first month, $115 thereafter (includes setup fee, excludes VAT, after euro to usd conversion, 
      includes cheapest hd option)
      ec2: $648/month
    

There are a lot of other factors like the additional services amazon provides,
failover, scaling, bandwidth quality, US ping times, reserved instance
pricing, etc. It's not a straightforward comparison, but I would argue that
for many users hetzner is the much faster and cheaper option.

edit: formatting, spelling

~~~
rehack
Looking at it this way, the price difference does look staggering. And I am
happy that Hetzner kind of dedicated hosting services will keep EC2 kind of
cloud hosting services honest.

We moved from a dedicated service to EC2 in 2010. At the time got some 30/40%
drop in the hosting cost for the same traffic. As apart from marginally less
hosting price, it also allowed us to start some instances in the day time and
shut them in the night. So hourly billing is a plus.

Which also allows me to not shy away from experimenting before use. For
example, on moving time we were on 32 bit and were running only small
instances.

Now we have built 64 bit images which allows running of anything we like from
small to extra-large. So for example at present we have 2 mediums and 1 small
running in the day time. And just 1 medium and 1 small running in the night
time.

And for some time in between tried it out with just 1 large and 1 small. I
always need a small one. As there are lots of scripts which keep doing health
checks etc. on each other, and can restart the other, on some conditions. So 2
instances are needed for reasons.

So you have to factor in these kind of reasons too. The dynamism it offers is
a big reason (and need for some) to stay there when the other alternative is
dedicated.

Sincere question: As I would like to be aware of some other good options. Does
some other companies like RackSpace offer as much control as EC2 does?

edit: typos and minor rephrase

~~~
sorenbs
The ability to easily clone a server, apply changes, test and eventually put
it in production is the number one reason we keep pouring money at aws.

~~~
fretnoise
Not sure if you need a "clone" for that. I'm running FreeBSD 9.0 with ZFS on
Hetzner. I can do a ZFS snapshot, apply changes, test, and then either commit
the changes or rollback to the snapshot.

------
jeffbarr
Here's a suggestion for a big improvement: Pick apart the EC2 pricing page (
<http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/> ) and find the URLs to the JSON (e.g.
<http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/ri-light-linux.json> ) and build something
that's totally dynamic.

Although the URLs and the formats aren't an official AWS API, I think it is
pretty safe to count on them for an application like this.

~~~
flyt
Dear person that works at Amazon Web Services: please just build this for the
community. ec2instances.info is a much better resource than the existing
pricing page and the calculator is entirely too much for many
uses/discussions.

thanks.

edit: or copy this: [http://mikekhristo.com/ec2-ondemand-vs-reserved-instance-
sav...](http://mikekhristo.com/ec2-ondemand-vs-reserved-instance-savings-
calculator/)

~~~
MrMike
Or you can just ask me to make whatever changes you want...

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dcurtis
This is awesome.

I was starting some instances this morning, and it's shocking how poorly
Amazon describes what they offer. I had three browser windows and a calculator
open just to figure out which instances are being offered, and at which
relative prices. You'd think they would spend more time on this stuff.

~~~
jeffbarr
What can we do better? What don't we tell you that would help you to make a
more informed decision?

~~~
dcurtis
I think it would make sense to merge the pricing and instance type sections
(in a similar way to the linked page), and to also have all of that
information in the new instance flow of the management console.

It would also be great if you could show estimated monthly/weekly pricing for
each instance type, with comparisons for reserved and on demand versions.

~~~
jeffbarr
That's excellent feedback. I will make sure that the team is aware of it
tomorrow morning.

~~~
pearle
I agree with the GP. I'm currently planning out a migration to EC2 for my
company and having all this information in one place would be a great help.

------
jtchang
I always tell people that EC2 generally costs more than a VPS. They don't
believe me until they actually do the calculation. You have to factor in
things like bandwidth and storage as well (which is usually included for
services like linode or slicehost).

~~~
zhoutong
Also have to consider the inferior CPU performance:

1 ECU is equivalent to 1.0 GHz - 1.2 GHz Xeon CPU in 2007. And the number of
cores is usually small.

~~~
dasrecht
Basically this is true and this leads to the conclusion that instance types
like (micro, small and medium) are quite underpowered compared to "today's"
usage patterns right?

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ben1040
Nice. Would be extra useful to see reserved instance pricing on here too.

~~~
mthreat
Here ya go, dynamic too (jeffbarr, take note) -
[http://mikekhristo.com/ec2-ondemand-vs-reserved-instance-
sav...](http://mikekhristo.com/ec2-ondemand-vs-reserved-instance-savings-
calculator/)

~~~
jeffbarr
That's really nice. Did you make it?

~~~
mthreat
I didn't - the author's name is on the page though. I use it so often, I
almost keep it in a dedicated browser tab.

~~~
MrMike
Glad it's working out for you... let me know if you want any changes

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cbsmith
Okay, how sad is it that there is this much excitement about what is
effectively a basic spread sheet?

~~~
jeffbarr
It sorts!

~~~
cbsmith
...which you can do in a spreadsheet.

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ajain11
A sheet I made long time back and takes into account reserved instances as
well. Making it public for you guys to use it. It is just for us-east for now:

[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AhvNig7yndNZdEx...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AhvNig7yndNZdExlRlVMM2h2VFFjbjA3VllwU3dIQkE#gid=0)

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tszming
Need to give a warning next to the t1.micro instance

e.g.

only for short bursts, extreme throttling afterward

~~~
jlgreco
Micros are pretty fantastic for non-commercial use. If I'm testing some stuff
out at home and need a couple different machines I can either fire up some
VMs.. but I'm on a netbook.. or I can almost instantly just pull up a couple
EC2 micro instances for the amount of money I find under the couch cushion
next to me.

I would never dream of trying to build anything meant to stick around and make
me money on one though of course.

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jakejake
I made a similar spreadsheet when I was trying to compare Amazon RDS with a
dedicated server from Rackspace. It's a little tricky due to different
services having different pricing methods - some of which based on the amount
of bandwidth you use. But, this is my attempt to neutralize the differences to
compare prices.

[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Avu9TF0Jdh2adHA...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Avu9TF0Jdh2adHA5eVZPRHhJUFByUHoxUUlQY1NMSEE)

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ww520
It would be very helpful to add two columns to include the reserved pricing
(one year and three year ones).

------
DrJ
would it be a stretch to pull in Rackspace, and any other large EC2-like
providers? I think having one of these tables as all in one during a meeting
is going to get some managers to reconsider their positions.

------
bobbles
Is there any information available about how popular each of these
configurations is? (do they release that kind of info?)

------
Uchikoma
It would be nice to have monthly prices for 50%, 100% utilization to better
compare with dedicated or shared hosting.

------
crosh
Has anyone done any cost benefit analyses of using EC2 versus a high
performance provider such as Stome On Demand?

------
UnoriginalGuy
One issue I've had with EC2 is frankly the fact that you have less freedom. On
either a VPS or a dedicated server you normally have complete control over the
firewall (be-it either a hardware firewall or software).

On EC2 you have no way of putting yourself in the DMZ, and the "Security
Groups" only allow you to open up UDP or TCP forwarding. You cannot configure
any other type of protocol/traffic and cannot bypass it entirely.

------
buholzer
Finally! Some one did it, this is great!

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xxyyxyxyy
I'd like to see this offered in CSV format so we could export to Excel or
another spreadsheet program.

~~~
webreac
Does this fit your needs ? wget -q -O - <http://www.ec2instances.info/> | perl
-nl0e 'print "\n" if /<.tr>/;print "$1;" if /<td. _> (._)<.td>/ or /<th. _>
(._)<.th>/'

