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Amazon Beefs Up Its Cloud Ahead of MS Announcement
Amazon has announced several major improvements to its EC2 service for cloud computing. The service is now in production (no longer beta); it offers a service-level agreement; and Windows and SQL Server are available in beta form. ZDNet points out that all this news is intended to take some wind out of Microsoft's sails as MS is expected to introduce its own cloud services next week at its Professional Developers Conference.
Replace "cloud" with "mainframe" and take 40 years off your age, and then you pretty much have it, as is my understanding.
Add to that the cost.. In our cost comparisons we found EC2 costing the same or more than managed dedicated servers with tier 1 providers.
BAM! That's what turned me off of Amazon as well. Anything they can do, I can do cheaper elsewhere with "conventional" servers. There are literally hundreds if not thousands of hosting companies just dying to lease you a $49/mo dedicated server that runs circles around any EC2 VPS, and most of them have at least 500gb of traffic included in the base price.
For ~$150 I have 10mbit unmetered, on a dual-core Xeon. Actually I have several, with reverse proxies and what-have-you, just like the Amazon cats do when they want to scale. The big differences are: I have static IPs, and my costs are lower. I am at risk of hardware failures, but then again I can afford an extra box or two for redundancy/backups.
I could see EC2 being worthwhile for small or short-lived jobs, but the moment you start talking about multiple instances and pound/squid nodes, you might as well move to a dedicated box.
-Billco, Fnarg.com