| 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 |
As for the experimenting part, you could build yourself your own VM cluster. There are a lot of prepackaged solutions such as oVirt which come with the full administration suite and some even come with the preconfigured OS. It really isn't very complicated and you get predictable performance on modern hardware.