Thursday 4 June 2009

Comparing Amazon EC2 to standard Windows hosting





I know the benifits of Cloud computing, are that your resources scale with your needs, so if nobody visits your website at 5am, you don't have to pay for it, and if a million users visit your site on christmas eve, then you can handle them.

But, Imagine a normal website, that gets a few hundred hits an hour. Pretty modest, but normal.

Compare amazon's pricing with a similar package:

United States
Europe

Standard Instances
Windows
Windows with Authentication Services
Small (Default)
$0.125 per hour
$0.25 per hour

Working that our, is 720 hours per month @ 0.0125 USD per hour is $90 per month, or 54 GBP.

A typical dedicated windows server (Core 2 Duo, 1G RAM) would be £49, so pretty similar.

On top of that, I guess you get the complexity of EC2, which is not as point and click as a simple rented server.

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