If the main motivator here is price (ability to charge per hour vs per month), and EC2 is so much more expensive than a VPS provider, have you done the math to see if buying a couple extra VPS's for the month would not break even or be cheaper overall? Linode is kind of pricey compared to other VPS providers.
The larger your site gets the less you're going to need to rely on "hourly" scaling (as your traffic models also become more predictable). There's also the question of uptime, which we've all seen is not a guarantee from just using Amazon.
> Linode is kind of pricey compared to other VPS providers.
Can you qualify this? The cost is lower than Amazon and Rackspace Cloud.
There are dime-store VPS providers out there that are technically less expensive, but they're usually not able to provide the same level of service. Linode always seems to provide exceptional customer support.
As a hosted continuous deployment service releasing changes and scaling automatically is a necessity.
I think the key here is that this blog is talking about a hosted service which responds on demand to their client's needs on an hourly basis. EC2 has a lot of infrastructure which does this for them (as long as they can automate it) and is specifically built for this, whereas they'd have to write it themselves by interfacing with a VPS API otherwise. So EC2 might be worth the money to them. VPS providers are mostly more focussed on giving you 1 or 2 boxes to use, and then you leave your site running with occasional adjustments in capacity etc, not on spinning up and down servers on demand, which is a bit more specialised, and might require tens or even hundreds of servers.
For a normal site that's not going to be relevant, and a VPS is cheaper, for this site, it seems EC2 is a better fit...
How do you get around the IO issue? We've been looking at EC2 for, well, forever, but IO performance has always been a huge issue -- to the point where it'd cost more than hosting it ourselves just to scale IO performance to the point where it'd equal a couple self-hosted servers.
when i last used ec2, it was almost exclusively for async backend processes. in those cases, high throughput is important, but latency is not a factor in the same way. If there's a 300ms delay talking to the system from the outside world, it's no big deal.
that said, netflix seems to have solved the IO issue with ec2. I'd be curious to know more about their findings.
Builds failed from time to time because the network was simply gone. We worked around the issues by running commands again when they timed out, but it was one of the reasons
(the main reason being that having your own servers is simply not flexible enough) for switching from Hetzner
Linode is very competitively priced, but we need to scale up/down on an hourly basis. when there are less builds to run we simply want less servers to run.
Linode is much cheaper than Amazon when you go over the whole year, but it just doesn't fit our needs.
[+] [-] matlock|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] peterwwillis|13 years ago|reply
The larger your site gets the less you're going to need to rely on "hourly" scaling (as your traffic models also become more predictable). There's also the question of uptime, which we've all seen is not a guarantee from just using Amazon.
[+] [-] astrodust|13 years ago|reply
Can you qualify this? The cost is lower than Amazon and Rackspace Cloud.
There are dime-store VPS providers out there that are technically less expensive, but they're usually not able to provide the same level of service. Linode always seems to provide exceptional customer support.
[+] [-] grey-area|13 years ago|reply
As a hosted continuous deployment service releasing changes and scaling automatically is a necessity.
I think the key here is that this blog is talking about a hosted service which responds on demand to their client's needs on an hourly basis. EC2 has a lot of infrastructure which does this for them (as long as they can automate it) and is specifically built for this, whereas they'd have to write it themselves by interfacing with a VPS API otherwise. So EC2 might be worth the money to them. VPS providers are mostly more focussed on giving you 1 or 2 boxes to use, and then you leave your site running with occasional adjustments in capacity etc, not on spinning up and down servers on demand, which is a bit more specialised, and might require tens or even hundreds of servers.
For a normal site that's not going to be relevant, and a VPS is cheaper, for this site, it seems EC2 is a better fit...
[+] [-] mvkel|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jameskilton|13 years ago|reply
http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2012/08/fast-forward-provisioned-...
[+] [-] ajross|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] matlock|13 years ago|reply
The virtual machine lies on EBS, but it is really fast to start and performance is not limited by EBS at all in our case.
[+] [-] killface|13 years ago|reply
that said, netflix seems to have solved the IO issue with ec2. I'd be curious to know more about their findings.
[+] [-] ezequiel-garzon|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] matlock|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 127001brewer|13 years ago|reply
I thought that Linode is competitively priced - is that a wrong assumption? (What is the pricing of Amazon's EC2 per year compared to Linode's?)
[+] [-] matlock|13 years ago|reply
Linode is much cheaper than Amazon when you go over the whole year, but it just doesn't fit our needs.
[+] [-] ajitk|13 years ago|reply
They have APIs to manage on-demand instances as well.
[+] [-] sp332|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jimktrains2|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mp99e99|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] huoju|13 years ago|reply
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