|
" … I am still horrified at the price of data at scale." This isn't "the price of data at scale", this is "the price of flexible, reliable, available data at scale" I think what some people don't understand, is that Amazon _aren't_ trying to compete on price. With Amazon, you're paying a premium for the ability to scale, both up and down, very quickly. Rackspace, Linode, and some-guy-subletting-racks-in-some-local-datacenter can easily beat EC2 prices for "general purpose servers". What Amazon does differently is let you quickly and easily go from 1 "server" to 10 or 100 servers, then switch most of them back off again 4 hours later. I deal with a great local hosting guy, who can (and does) fast track provisioning for me at times, but if I called him and said "Ummm, the CEO is on Oprah tonight, I need 100 additional webservers, a load balancer or two, and a dozen database slaves; to keep my not-architected-for-scale-but-suddenly-in-need-of-it web app alive at 8:30pm tonight", there's no way he'd be able to do it. And even if he _could_ there's now way he'd agree to if I said "and I only want to pay for it all until midnight, then shut all the extra down and go back to charging me for my single instance". "$1000 per terabyte per year" might seem crazy expensive if a sensible alternative for your data storage requirements is to go to BestBuy and grab a 2TB external drive for ~$100. But that's a _very_ different thing to what Amazon are selling... |
Our current CDN provides for 4k per month what amazon would charge 18k for.
Yes, that 4k is on a 12 month contract that we had to negotiate. We are paying for about 4 times the bandwidth per month that we are actually consuming at the moment, but it's just so much cheaper overall and the bandwidth we don't consume each month rolls over to the next. (We plan to consume it all one day!)
I firmly believe that the vast majority of AWS customers are paying for flexibility that they are not actually using 99% of the time.