I’m sorry, I’m quite confused about Amazon’s new offering – EC2. It sounds great in theory, elastic IP addresses, cool, persistent storage (eventually – cool), availability zones (cool). However, it’s pretty much the same as paying for a virtual server actually – that’s where my problem starts, how is it different? Ok, so you can fire up your new service using a specific distro, Fedora whatever, yada yada and you can add more instances of that service and have failover between them, groovy but I’m pretty sure you can do this with an existing hosting solution, take Bytemark for example (http://www.bytemark.co.uk/) I’ve been with them for about a year now, I pay around 150 GBP ($300) for the solution per year. That buys me a managed Centos installed O/S on a virtual machine that has 150MB RAM, 10GB space, 50GB in traffic, 2GB backup space, some watchdog type services. I have full root access and can redelegate IP addresses to the DNS as I wish, I can setup more virtual machines via Xen if I want. With Amazon I get:

1.7 GB of memory, 1 EC2 Compute Unit (1 virtual core with 1 EC2 Compute Unit), 160 GB of instance storage,

Amazon EC2 is a little easier to manage since I can install an O/S on the fly (which is non persistent as present) but have less control over it and ok it’s more powerful, but at what cost – well the basic amount is $0.10 per hour. Before traffic that’s

24 * $0.10 = $2.40 a day
365 * $2.40 a day = $876.00 per year

Traffic on top of this is $0.10 per GB, so matching with Bytemark that’s another 5 dollars on top so it scales pretty well with regards to that. However, $300.00 a year as opposed to nearly $900.00 a year… For $1200 with Bytemark I get my dedicated server, I’m pretty sure this comes in cheaper than this when we look at dedicated servers in North America. It’s confusing as to whether it’s good value for money or not…