[ryan-allen]

> Beating AWS on EC2 pricing is easy. AWS EC2 pricing is insanely expensive. German providers like Hetzner Cloud entered the market at 1/10th of the EC2 price.

This has always been my problem with AWS. Cost savings might make sense for someone who actually needs 200 servers but if I just want one I'm paying 10 times as much for half as much in terms of performance.

It rubs me the wrong way when a $70/mo AWS instance is more than twice as slow than a $10/mo 'traditional' VPS instance.

[dragonwriter]

> It rubs me the wrong way when a $70/mo AWS instance is more than twice as slow than a $10/mo 'traditional' VPS instance.

Elastic compute of the type provided by EC2 and similar services (Google Compute Engine, etc.) is a fundamentally different service than simple VPS. AWS has something that is, or is very close to, a simple VPS in LightSail, and the pricing is pretty competitive with other VPS providers.

LightSail doesn't have a $70/mo instance, the closest is $80/mo for a 16GB RAM, 4-core, 320GB SSD instance with 6TB of transfer quota. The least expensive is $3.50/mo, and $10/mo gets you 2GB RAM, 1 core, 60GB SSD, and 3TB transfer.

[sah2ed]

> Elastic compute of the type provided by EC2 and similar services (Google Compute Engine, etc.) is a fundamentally different service than simple VPS.

What is the fundamental difference that you speak of?

At least to me, the only major difference is that while AWS markets their VMs as EC2 because they were designed for elasticity (i.e variable compute workloads), which explains the elastic in the name EC2; VPS providers OTOH market their VMs as a cheaper alternative to dedicated servers (i.e. fixed compute workloads).

The difference in pricing largely follows from the difference in design since the cloud shines when your resource needs are elastic. VPSes shine when your resource needs are largely inelastic.

[sweeneyrod]

Hetzner prices are less than half of LightSail. They offer 4 cores/16GB RAM/320GB SSD for $28/month, and that comes with 20TB transfer rather than 6.

[sudosysgen]

80$ a month for 16GB RAM, 4 cores, is a very bad price. If you could buy the machine outright for less than the cost of 6 months, you should not buy it.

Also, 6TB/month is a bit over a day of download at 400Mbps. It's barely even worth mentioning.

[collyw]

While I agree, I am not sure that most businesses need elastic scaling.

[dragonwriter]

> While I agree, I am not sure that most businesses need elastic scaling.

Sure, lots don't. Which is why, even if AWS is the right vendor, EC2 isn't the right service for lots of uses. That's why LightSail is a thing. Comparing VPS pricing to EC2 pricing to say AWS is too expensive is the wrong comparison, because of AWS services, EC2 isn't the one that any application that can be acceptable served by a traditional VPS ought to use. It's not an apples to apples comparison. It's not even apples to oranges. It's something like apples to pork roast.