Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Cloud Hosting : Amazon EC2 vs dedicated - what's the benefit?

[hdezela]

I've taken on a client with a news website that serves both static and video (http, not streamed) content, plus a couple of newsletters that are sent out regularly. After a few rounds of briefs and comments, I had specced out a server on Singlehop.com with the following characteristics:

.- Core2Quad @ 2.83Ghz
.- 6.00GB RAM
.- 1TB Hard disk
.- 5 Fixed IPs
.- 10TB Monthly transfer

, at a total cost of $314.00 monthly.

Some "consultant" then recommended my client towards Amazon EC2 saying its cheaper and better than a dedicated server. The Amazon price calculator (using average transfer rates) for a comparable system gives me a total of $626.92 per month if I use EC2 storage (risky...) and $634.42 if I use S3 storage.

However, if I prototype an entire year (using historical data), the Singlehop server is $3,768.00 per year (just 314x12) - but the Amazon server is a whopping $8,324.16, more than twice as much.

So am I missing something here or are we just below the economy of scale necessary to actually see the cost savings?

[manager-srvrz]

He must have said to migrate to EC2 because its based on cloud computing. While the other one is a dedicated server.

I will advise not to go with Amazon EC2 because of a lot of reasons which do not appear in the first shot. On a amazon server you can never get 2 IPs allocated to a single server.

Amazon is costly and a lot of people have lost data on their servers.

How can I get more than one IP address?

An Amazon EC2 instance is limited to only one public IP address for external use from outside the Amazon EC2 network. Each instance is also assigned a single IP address for internal use within the cloud.

You'll find more information about instance addressing in our tech docs.


--------------------- SEE AMAZON FAQ -------------------------

Can I manage my DNS within Amazon EC2?

All instances come with an internal and external DNS name. Amazon EC2 does not provide access to modify these DNS settings. If you would like to map an existing domain name to an Amazon EC2 instance you will need to use one of the many DNS management services that are available on the Internet today.

Within Amazon EC2, DNS requests for the external DNS name of an instance will resolve to the internal IP address of the corresponding instance.

When using your own domain name, we recommended mapping to the instance's external DNS name using a CNAME, not by using an A record pointing at the instance's IP address.


Does Amazon EC2 support reverse DNS lookups for email sent from my instance?

If you modified the DNS for your domain (mydomain.com) to include a CNAME to the external DNS name of an instance, and send an email to someone from your instance [user@mydomain.com] a reverse DNS lookup will result in the external EC2 DNS name, not mydomain.com.

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[manager-srvrz]

Cloud computing is high availability, and you can scale and copy your instances. It is the main advantage in comparison to any other hosting.

If you want we can also help you find a good cloud computing service which is not yet launched officially but is very good.

[Negizmo]

I'd go with a dedicated server unless you really need the expandability that a cloud environment provides - which most people don't.

For those that don't require this expandability, you will find that you are paying significantly more than you would probably be if you simply went with a dedicated server (or even a VPS).

Clouds are incredible and work wonders for some, but for others.. it's just not so suitable.

[dazmanultra]

The idea with Amazon's cloud is that you build an application using multiple smaller cloud instances. Using one big server instance isn't really "cloud". When you have an application that can take advantage of multiple server instances (e.g. load balancing web requests, clustering your database, etc) you can then scale up and down your system based on current load. For instance, you may know that on weekends, you need twice as much capacity as on weekdays. With a well engineered cloud solution, you can automatically provision additional web serving instances and database nodes to services the greater number of requests at the weekend, shutting those nodes down once you're back to Monday.

This means that instead of paying for capacity all the time that you're not using, you only need to pay for capacity when you require it.

As said, however, this requires a better paradigm in application/system design for you to take advantage. If you just need one, big powerful server, then a dedicated server is going to be better for you.

[Southprojects]

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=308055

Here you can find that the performance of ec2 is disappointed at best (in comparison with VPS!).
A colleague mine did a performance test and while the disk is pretty fast but the rest is regular to bad.

One of the advantage of ec2 (apart of scalability) is the amount of free "pre-custom" installation.

[peterlouis]

Did you account for Amazon's 'Reserved Instances'? If you know you are going to have a full server up for a year, you get a 30% discount (I think). If it is 3 yrs, you get a 50% discount.

Multiple IPs can be handled using their Load Balancer.

But mostly, I agree with dazmanultra. Do you really need one big server? Or are you cramming a bunch of stuff that would naturally run on their own servers onto one big iron?

[ncix]

from my experience, dedicated servers are still the way to go. Amazon is ridiculously bad at disk I/O, we had one c++ script take 40 seconds long to build an index of a database on an EC2 instance, whereas with rackspace cloud servers it takes about 20 seconds, on a dedicated server with a 10k rpm drive, about 5 seconds.

The other issue is the uplink ports. With cloud computing through Amazon or Rackspace, you'll rarely get more than 40 or 50mb uplink. Dedicated servers, either a 10mb or 100mb guaranteed which means you aren't sharing the port speed with anyone.

The thing with cloud computing, while cpu/ram is dedicated, disk IO isn't and the port uplink is NOT (to my knowledge). For us this is a real big problem which is why we are still using dedicated servers for most of our stuff.

It all really depends on your own setup. With videos and bandwidth intensive stuff like that, I'd highly recommend starting with dedicated servers. with cloud computing bandwidth is bloody expensive. You'd be paying around $2,000 for 10TB bandwidth alone when it's included with the $300 fee with singlehop.

But with dedicated servers, hardwares always a problem whereas with cloud computing it isn't.

[peterlouis]

Yes, Amazon IO is terrible. Some have had success with RAID striping EBS volumes to get respectable bandwidth, but not everyone sees a benefit (apparently sequential writes don't get much better when you RAID over EBS).

But, to really take advantage of Amazon's infrastructure, you might consider more than just EC2. Serving videos out of S3/CloudFront can give you massive scalability benefits...

[TowerOfPower]

Originally Posted by hdezela

Some "consultant" then recommended my client towards Amazon EC2 saying its cheaper and better than a dedicated server. The Amazon price calculator (using average transfer rates) for a comparable system gives me a total of $626.92 per month if I use EC2 storage (risky...) and $634.42 if I use S3 storage.

However, if I prototype an entire year (using historical data), the Singlehop server is $3,768.00 per year (just 314x12) - but the Amazon server is a whopping $8,324.16, more than twice as much.

So am I missing something here or are we just below the economy of scale necessary to actually see the cost savings?

You are not missing ANYTHING.

The current generation of "cloud" solutions are nothing more than VPSs that can scale to 1 server exactly. They are frequently plagued with poor latency, i/o issues, bad and inconsistent performance, lots of limitations/restrictions, and high price. The ones that do scale to multiple servers require you to fit your site/software into their framework and platform (and still have all the problems as listed previously).

I would stick to dedicated. It wins hands down.

[UNIXy]

EC2 was never meant to be cost effective. Its selling point is horizontal scalability. Those who use EC2 need to scale out at any cost. If one dedicated server is enough for the task at hand, then EC2 doesn't add any value to your client. If on the other hand you need to scale out to 5 or more dedicated servers, you can start thinking about the cloud. Although one could easily build a private cloud if needed.

Regards
Joe / UNIXy

[Kin Lane]

Amazon Web Services is not for everyone. It definitely is not the fastest and ideal situation for all businesses. It definitely is not the cheapest.

However Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3 can put some great tools in the hands of business to really help them deploy their infrastructure as it should be and provide a quality of service.

In some situations it can be cheaper, but others you can realize you were spending too little on your infrastructure.

It offers load balancing, version control, instance scaling and other services that would just be too expensive to deploy in-house.

Business should get to know and understand Amazon Web Services just beyond the cloud hype. See what truly works for their business and see where there is a good fit.

[arisythila]

Originally Posted by hdezela

I've taken on a client with a news website that serves both static and video (http, not streamed) content, plus a couple of newsletters that are sent out regularly. After a few rounds of briefs and comments, I had specced out a server on Singlehop.com with the following characteristics:

.- Core2Quad @ 2.83Ghz
.- 6.00GB RAM
.- 1TB Hard disk
.- 5 Fixed IPs
.- 10TB Monthly transfer

, at a total cost of $314.00 monthly.

Some "consultant" then recommended my client towards Amazon EC2 saying its cheaper and better than a dedicated server. The Amazon price calculator (using average transfer rates) for a comparable system gives me a total of $626.92 per month if I use EC2 storage (risky...) and $634.42 if I use S3 storage.

However, if I prototype an entire year (using historical data), the Singlehop server is $3,768.00 per year (just 314x12) - but the Amazon server is a whopping $8,324.16, more than twice as much.

So am I missing something here or are we just below the economy of scale necessary to actually see the cost savings?

The Benefits. Your dedicated server will more than likely have more uptime, and less problems than with Amazon's EC2. Sorry. There service still has a long way to mature.

[sailor]

Originally Posted by hdezela

I've taken on a client with a news website that serves both static and video (http, not streamed) content, plus a couple of newsletters that are sent out regularly. After a few rounds of briefs and comments, I had specced out a server on Singlehop.com with the following characteristics:

.- Core2Quad @ 2.83Ghz
.- 6.00GB RAM
.- 1TB Hard disk
.- 5 Fixed IPs
.- 10TB Monthly transfer

, at a total cost of $314.00 monthly.

Some "consultant" then recommended my client towards Amazon EC2 saying its cheaper and better than a dedicated server. The Amazon price calculator (using average transfer rates) for a comparable system gives me a total of $626.92 per month if I use EC2 storage (risky...) and $634.42 if I use S3 storage.

However, if I prototype an entire year (using historical data), the Singlehop server is $3,768.00 per year (just 314x12) - but the Amazon server is a whopping $8,324.16, more than twice as much.

So am I missing something here or are we just below the economy of scale necessary to actually see the cost savings?

EC2 will severly disappoint you based on what I have read in performance compared to a dedicated - EC2 has issues with performance from time to time during certain peak times.

On another note - that seems pretty pricey for that dedicated that you are looking at it unless its fully managed.

[Kin Lane]

@sailor I have to say from running 10-20 servers permanently in the cloud for the last 2 years. And I run conference web sites for SAP, Google, and CA there are not the major performance and IO latency issues that people who read and speculate claim.

Sure you are on a virtualized environment. With higher computer instances available to me, and regional data centers to deploy in...it kicks but over my historical rackspace and other colo relationships I've been in.

I had my EC2 budget doubled this year over last year because of performance gains delivered on a CRM system for SAP internal.

I always say Amazon Cloud is not for everyone, but people really need to try out and see what services fit for their business.