<story><title>Amazon bares its computers</title><url>http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/15/amazon-bares-its-computers/?_r=0</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jsnk</author><text>&amp;gt;“All of our engineers are focused” on reducing the costs of computing&lt;p&gt;If this is so, how is it that a startup like Digital Ocean that&amp;#x27;s only 2 years old find a way to provide $5&amp;#x2F;month plan that&amp;#x27;s running on SSD while m1.small on EC2 which is slower than DO costing me around $40&amp;#x2F;month? At this rate, I should probably buy a server myself and run it at home.&lt;p&gt;I like AWS and its ecosystem, but I am tired of Amazon continuing to provide shitty service for a ridiculous cost.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>chaz</author><text>I use DO and AWS for different projects because they meet different needs. Of course there are going to be places where one is better suited than the other in both performance and price.&lt;p&gt;For example, one of my projects requires 1TB of drive space. At DO, I have no choice but to go to the $960&amp;#x2F;mo 1 TB plan. But I don&amp;#x27;t need the SSD speed, 96 GB of RAM, 24 cores, or the 10 TB of monthly transfer. But with EC2, I can just use EBS @ $100&amp;#x2F;mo&amp;#x2F;TB and pair it with the right-size EC2 instance for the jobs at hand. As an aside, the real question for me is to decide whether I want to invest in a proper dedicated server where I can get good performance and online storage at a lower cost.&lt;p&gt;DO has done a fantastic job at finding a spot in the VPS market, which is why I&amp;#x27;m one of their customers. It doesn&amp;#x27;t mean Amazon is doing it wrong.</text></comment>
<story><title>Amazon bares its computers</title><url>http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/15/amazon-bares-its-computers/?_r=0</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jsnk</author><text>&amp;gt;“All of our engineers are focused” on reducing the costs of computing&lt;p&gt;If this is so, how is it that a startup like Digital Ocean that&amp;#x27;s only 2 years old find a way to provide $5&amp;#x2F;month plan that&amp;#x27;s running on SSD while m1.small on EC2 which is slower than DO costing me around $40&amp;#x2F;month? At this rate, I should probably buy a server myself and run it at home.&lt;p&gt;I like AWS and its ecosystem, but I am tired of Amazon continuing to provide shitty service for a ridiculous cost.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mattbillenstein</author><text>Cloud is great when you&amp;#x27;re in the discovery phase as it provides loads of flexibility for a small startup to try stuff out without investing in hardware, but at the point you&amp;#x27;re spending $50k&amp;#x2F;month in the cloud, racking servers and building a private cloud can give you better performance at 20-30% of the cloud cost...  The main problem here is most startups don&amp;#x27;t have the expertise in house to make it happen.&lt;p&gt;Everyone thinks cloud is cheaper, but it&amp;#x27;s more about flexibility and avoiding capex, but at a certain scale, it makes sense to host it yourself - or pay someone to build it out for you.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m working in this cloud -&amp;gt; private-cloud migration space currently if anyone is interested in discussing.</text></comment>