[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?

[cperciva]

Remember that it's not fair to compare "VPS with 1 TB of free bandwidth" against "EC2 instance plus 1 TB of bandwidth" unless you're actually going to be using 1 TB of bandwidth.

[notatoad]

My experience with ec2 is that you get significantly better performance for the price. An ec2 micro is possible to run a webapp with moderate traffic from, a comparably prices VPS migt have similar stated specs but they're all so oversold they can't really be used for anything worthwhile.