I will concede that AWS does have a serious advantage for some projects
since it is "by the drink"... you pay for what you use. However, AWS
does NOT have the cheapest bandwidth around. A quickie comparison of the
equivalent of a decent server running all month using a 5.1TB of
bandwidth transfer (100G in and 5TB out):
Amazon:
One EC2 Computer Unit = 1.0 - 1.2 Operon/Xeon 2007 CPU
Or 1.7GHz Xeon from early 2006
Large Instance ($.40/hr = $293.60/mo)
7.5 GB of memory, 4 EC2 Compute Units (2 virtual cores with 2 EC2
Compute Units each), 850 GB of instance storage, 64-bit platform
Bandwidth: 100G in and 5000G out = $910/mo
Total = $1202/mo for 1 "Large Instance" and 5.1TB of transfer
----------------------------------------------------
M5Hosting (just because I am familiar with our pricing, but I am sure
you will find plenty of other sources for the same or less $)
M5Hosting Quad-core server ($279/mo)
8GB RAM, Quad Core Xeon X3220 (4 cores at 2.4GHz each), 500GB
storage (2x500GB drives in RAID 1 mirror), 64-bit, OS of your choice.
20Mbps dedicated bandwidth on our "ValueNet" = $399/mo (upto ~6.1TB
each way)
50Mbps dedicated bandwidth on our "ValueNet" = $750/mo (upto ~15.4TB
each way)
Notes: "ValueNet" is out high volume network. It's just a nickname. It's
still a BGP routed network of our own construction consisting of
multiple carriers. I realize this is less storage on board than the AWS
"Large Instance", but we can upgrade to 2 x 1TB disks or 4x500G in RAID
10 and still be materially under the AWS cost for the same resources.
Total = $1029 for 1 server and 50Mbps dedicated (far more than 5.1TB)
-------------------------------------------------------
My point of this is not to say we are cheaper and all shall forsake AWS
and buy from us. My point is that if price is your only criteria, and it
is almost always not, then it is not a forgone conclusion that AWS is
the cheapest. We aren't even the cheapest on bandwidth. But, it sure is
handy that with a dynamic environment, you can pay only for what you
use. If you knew about what you'd use, then you can get better deals
elsewhere. For explosive growth or a model that ebbs and flows, or even
when growth can't be forecast, AWS is hard to beat for many reasons, for
some model even price.
Oh, we do have people that forget to limit their upstream bandwidth in
their BT clients, and find themselves using 60Mbps until they have far
exceeded their bandwidth allocation. That can be very expensive on our
"PremiumNet" where it most often happens (and where it costs so much
more). "With great power must come great responsibility". Or, with
apologies to Stan Lee, "With fat pipes and burstable bandwidth you must
edit your config file" (or be willing to pay the bill).
Now stop reading your email and go outside !
Mike
On Sat, 2008-03-08 at 13:11 -0800, Andrew Lentvorski wrote:
> Two things:
>
> 1) Amazon generally has some of the best bandwidth prices around bar
> none. Nobody I have been able to extract a quote out of comes close.
>
> For something like BitTorrent which is basically just vacuuming up
> dumb
> bandwidth, this is pretty close to ideal.
>
> 2) Amazon would become the main pipe given infinite bandwidth and
> zero
> latency. In the real world, however, Amazon presents neither. I'm
> sure
> that Amazon has limits on both.
>
> If nothing else, the compute power of an EC3 instance probably limits
> this.
>
> So, if too many people were using you as a direct download, all you
> need
> to do is reduce the number of EC3 instances running BitTorrent.
> Latency
> goes up, bandwidth goes down, and people start pulling the other
> seeds.
>
> -a
--
************************************************************
Michael J. McCafferty
Principal, Security Engineer
M5 Hosting
http://www.m5hosting.com
You can have your own custom Dedicated Server up and running today !
RedHat Enterprise, CentOS, Fedora, Debian, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, and more
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