Again, this is demonstrably false. What's commonly meant by "dedicated hosting" is essentially the same service level you get from EC2 - they they care of the network and hardware, you take care of the software (1).
The cost here is 2x-4x lower. In another comment, I quoted E5-2620 v3 w/64GB for $400 which is exactly this type of setup. This is offered by a company that's been in business for longer than AWS has existed and who, in web hosting circles, is well respected. You could definitely go cheaper. You could definitely go to IBM and rackspace and pay as much as EC2, sure...but there are literally thousands of providers in the US, which have been in business for over a decade that'll beat EC2/Rackspace/Softlayer by a wide margin.
Some that I've personally used: WebNX (LA), NetDepot (Atlanta), ReliableSite (NY), HiVelocity (Florida). I've also done it on the cheap with OVH (both Quebec and France) and Hetzner (Germany), as well as on the expensive side with Softlayer (you can negotiate softlayer down considerably even on a small order).
(1) That's disservice to dedicated hosting, because the quality of the network is often better, and you won't get termination emails from your hosting provider or noisy neighbours the way like you do on EC2.
Will those guys provide you with SQL Server cluster with at least 2 servers, Setup AlwaysOn, Setup failover clustering with Quorums, Optimal Disk Partition Alignment, DTC, setup subnets, ACLS to secure your cluster and lots of MSSQL Specific stuff I don't know about and then monitor it for you. Because that's what managed service is. And most ask a lot for this because of the specialists it requires.
If you pay for RDS, Amazon does this for you, and it would already be well setup below the application level. They have guys monitoring it, and keeping it up. And they can do this cheap because of the benefits of scale across all their customers.
If you just ask for machine than yes, that's going to be cheap. But your forgetting you need databases, Application delivery controllers, firewalls, VPN appliances. All of which may require niche vender knowledge to setup, and then they would charge a lot of consultancy fee's to design a solution for you. Amazon puts this stuff behind simple API's where you don't need to know all those vender specific skills.
I don't mean to be rude, but Github, Stackoverflow, and Wikipedia all run their own physical environments. Its easy to demonstrate that the cost savings you indicate in AWS don't exist.
AWS helps you prototype and iterate faster. It is not cheaper.
And I know a lots of companies that host on cloud, and made a cost saving after moving away from managed hosting because they were charging so much to look after it.
Github, Stackoverflow, and Wikipedia probably have very good dedicated specialists who salaries only make sense when you operate on their scale.
> And I know a lots of companies that host on cloud, and made a cost saving after moving away from managed hosting.
Can you provide a citation? Because AWS tools _are managed hosting_. They're just managed hosting without support (unless you're paying AWS for it on top of the service cost).
Well they tend to be smaller/medium size companies, because they don't have serious scale yet to hire specialists, but at the same time require reliable HA hosting. It can't just be some databases or web servers setup in a Adhoc fashion.
A lot of these articles that compare cloud vs dedicated only compare some web server in data centre.
They don't consider building a complete platform is a lot of work. You need to setup databases in highly available preformant fashion, backup solutions, off premise backups, ADC's(Netscalers for example), firewalls, subnets, Storage(SANS), ACLS, Site to site VPNS(or MPLS) etc which requires some knowledgeable people to setup. Companies that setup this for you, rightly charge quite a bit for it.
> If you just ask for machine than yes, that's going to be cheap. But your forgetting you need databases, Application delivery controllers, firewalls, VPN appliances. All of ...
What do vpn appliances have to do with database hosting ? I'm guessing you're an enterprise java developer ?
Notice how all of those companies present themselves as consultancies.
The rest just show virtual machine prices, dedicated machine prices etc. You have to dig around the websites to find anything about "complete" database solutions. They present you with a phone number and you will have to phone them up, and it won't be cheap. They will charge consultancy fees.
I'm not talking about database hosting. I'm talking about setting up a web hosting platform. A lot of companies would like secure access via VPN. Imagine you have some network appliance, you would probably want its admin console completely cut-off(via ACL) via public internet. You would access it via site to site vpn instead.
Having worked at one of these for ~6 years ... no they don't (well, it is true that you can get extra services of course, and I bet there are some that do charge, but in general, they don't).
For having a hosted + backed up database that's redundant (I hear master-slave with auto-promotion is quite common, mysql and postgresql are available) and that THEY will fix when it becomes unreachable, or cable cut or ... that's a standard product, and there's no fees for fixing it when it goes down.
All I know is that the most expensive dedicated customer we had (which we did a database for) paid less than $20k, and he had about 800000 DAUs (and is a well known site).
Also, in all the time I've been in the industry, I've known a single instance of hardware failure leading to data loss. I've heard of dozens of times of perfectly authorized accidentally erasing/corrupting the database (mostly because they wanted me to figure out how to repair it). This is the real threat, and will require consultancy to fix, given the average level of technical competency of cloud customers, both on cloud and dedicated.
Another one was a dating site that had less than half that in charges (no idea about DAUs), moved to amazon, balked at a bill that (after serious optimization and large customer discounts) exceeded $100k mostly moved back to us (only using amazon as backup location).
Cloud has a number of advantages, but price is definitely not one of them. And there's serious "fine print", like that most of the cloud advantages (like "not losing data when a physical machine dies") don't apply to small customers.
The big secret is that scaling customer apps generally runs into issues because the customer's programmers are not considering efficiency at all. Letting me loose on their code results in 20-30 TIMES improvement within hours, not because I'm that good, but because usually the first factor 10 is simply not getting the same data 10 times from the DB. No real difference between languages in the programmer's skill level (with exceptions for rare languages : Haskell programmers, for instance, are definitely better, but that will stop if it ever becomes popular). There are exceptions, of course, but this is the common situation. Having done 2 cloud migrations in the last year I worked at one of these managed hosting shops, scaling doesn't work any better on cloud, in fact it often works far worse because PHP's performance far exceeds what you get with ruby or python/django. When you exceed shared serving you can move up to managed/dedicated for a big performance boost (in fact the hoster will probably do this for free when you upgrade your plan), which is likely to last you for more growth. The issue is that PHP shared hosting in my experience often serves more customers than 4-5 dedicated django or RoR servers can (mostly because like all ORM, django's ORM means 40-50 database calls per page showing, RoR is no different). And unlike cloud, serving pictures or even video will result in your site slowing down, not in a $10k bill.
That said, there are things the cloud is good for. We fail badly for customers that require having truly large amounts of diskspace simply accessible (we're talking 10+ Tb or so, that's constantly accessed, before this becomes an issue), or if they need massive amounts of compute that needs to scale with very little warning. Even in those cases, the times I've seen they quickly decided that storing some files in the cloud through remote filesystems is far preferable to actually running the site on the cloud, due to cost. AWS lambda is pretty useful for this: quickly run some code on input, store result on S3, don't keep the remote task running. Uploading java code is easy, so if the task is processing/tagging/creating reports/pdfs/... it's easy to code up, test locally, and packaged as a jar it will work.
I would have agreed about specialization in older versions of MSSQL but they specifically made the HA sysadmin experience with AlwaysOn a cakewalk. I think any sysadmin with a decent amount of general experience could get it all figured out within 1-2 normal workdays (including your average interruptions).
The cost here is 2x-4x lower. In another comment, I quoted E5-2620 v3 w/64GB for $400 which is exactly this type of setup. This is offered by a company that's been in business for longer than AWS has existed and who, in web hosting circles, is well respected. You could definitely go cheaper. You could definitely go to IBM and rackspace and pay as much as EC2, sure...but there are literally thousands of providers in the US, which have been in business for over a decade that'll beat EC2/Rackspace/Softlayer by a wide margin.
Some that I've personally used: WebNX (LA), NetDepot (Atlanta), ReliableSite (NY), HiVelocity (Florida). I've also done it on the cheap with OVH (both Quebec and France) and Hetzner (Germany), as well as on the expensive side with Softlayer (you can negotiate softlayer down considerably even on a small order).
(1) That's disservice to dedicated hosting, because the quality of the network is often better, and you won't get termination emails from your hosting provider or noisy neighbours the way like you do on EC2.