| The only problem with your comparison is that you forgot to include the 149 Euro setup fee for the Hetzner server. I don't think this makes a material difference however over three years. Some would say this isn't fair because you're not including elastic scaling which AWS supports, however you can't elastically scale with a 3 year commitment. Further its hard to estimate how much scaling you'll need because that's a highly variable figure. But you can say that you will need to keep some number of servers up and running 24/7 for your service. I think it would be a more perfect comparison to compare AWS's on-demand price to Hetzner with the built in higher performance of the 4S considered as a hot standby for scaling. (I don't know how long it takes Hetzner to provision extras, though I hear its relatively fast.) Since servers are cheap (at Hetzner, at least) it seems reasonable to have 1 or 2 extra spun up if you really have spiky traffic. Since I'm planning to get a cluster of Hetzner boxes to support a Riak distributed cluster, and each Hetzner box is over provisioned for my needs (if I get a 4S I think they will be way over-provisioned, leaving a lot of headroom for this "elastic scaling" issue)... I think I'll compare the price of the same number of each boxes. (The AWS box has less performance, but I can elastically scale if I need to, and I'll just give the cost of those short term scale-ups to Amazon for free in this example.) The results may not be a perfect example for whatever others are considering, but it is a reasonable comparison for my purposes. (my service is a big data service, involving a lot of map reduce, requiring a cluster for operational simplicity and reliability as well as the ability to scale to millions of customers. I don't know if we'll get millions of customers, but one of our closest competitors had millions of customers within a few weeks.) Amortizing the
4@ m2.4xlarge = 4* $600/month = $2,400 (using the $600 for the reserved instance costs from vladd's example.) 4@ Hetzner 4S = $149 Euro setup fee, amortized over 3 years = 4.14 Euro/month Add the 49.58 Euros in hosting = 53.71 euros x 4 servers = 214.87 euros or $282.50 a month. So, for my cluster, AWS is 8.5 times as expensive. I think that $282 per month is a lot easier for a scrappy startup to handle than $2,400 as well. This brings "big data" within the realm of undefended mortals. Many people use AWS for all the extra services that AWS offers. The value of these services is, of course, subjective, as some startups will need them and others won't. But they all are based on a custom Amazon API which means if you build your architecture across many servers at Amazon you've got a fair amount of lock-in. For me, I'll take the 8.5X reduction in costs, over lock in anyway. If Hetzner starts performing poorly, I can migrate without too much difficulty, and without having to re-architect my service. |