Convince me one way or the other…
I’m seriously looking into hosting for my pet project, and Dreamhost might not cut it. Looking at my probable future requirements:
- I want to be able to install my own packages (Dreamhost doesn’t make this ~easy~)
- Run ~heavy~ processing jobs like image resizing, pdf generation
- Queue-based work division (ie: SQS or beanstalkd)
- Experiment with non-mysql data stores (ie: HBase, Cassandra)
- Ratings calculations over larger data sets (ie: Cascading / MapReduce / Hadoop)
The pricing for EC2 has always turned me off as it’s a tad high to just blow for no good reason. Looking at their recent rates, they have a new pricing option called “reserved” which reduces the daily price but for a higher upfront cost.
AWS EC2 - Small Instance:
- ~1.0ghz Xeon / Opteron
- 1.7gb RAM
- 160gb Disk
AWS EC2 - OnDemand Small Instance:
- $0.085 / hr
- = $2.04 / day
- = $744.60 / year
AWS EC2 - Reserved Small Instance 1 year:
- $0.03 / hr + $227.50
- = $0.72 / day
- = $262.80 / year
- = $490.30 / year
AWS EC2 - Reserved Small Instance 3 years:
- $0.03 / hr + $350.00
- = $0.72 / day
- = $262.80 / year
- = ~$379.47 / year
With Dreamhost, I’m on the ~$190.80 every two years plan, paid up through 2011, which you can’t really beat with a stick. The only thing I’m currently using it for is a basic text-based blog and a few other PHP things but it is convenient and familiar for the basics. With that I’ve currently got ~500gb disk and ~11tb bandwidth, excess disk and bandwidth are not included in the above EC2 price comparisons.
So, currently Dreamhost is almost a rounding error compared to committing to Amazon and I’m not currently at the point where I have any traffic worth committing to the cost or overhead of working with EC2. The difficult part is that the development models vary significantly depending on whether I get to play with the cool toys and install my own packages on an EC2 instance or whether I’m stuck with what I can beat out of Dreamhost shared hosting.
I’d be all over an Amazon “90% idle” instance with ~1gb ram and 500mhz processor that was less expensive or didn’t have hard performance guarantees, but I’m guessing it’ll be a while before they go after that market.
22:21 CST | category / entries
permanent link | comments?