Apples and Lizards
I’ve just been researching the estimated cost of cloud computing on some of the various providers out there who want to absorb your servers into their clouds.
Doing this research has been like comparing apples to lizards. The providers all have their own way of billing you, and there’s a whole host of extra features offered, some free, some not. To help you on your quest I present some nice tables with the results of my investigations here.
data
I tried taking a fixed monthly budget and seeing what best value I could get for the money as I think this is a fairer and more realistic comparison. I have as far as possible searched for the best deals (e.g. using amazon’s reserved instances and GoGrid’s pre-pay plans).
| Price | Resource | EC2 | GoGrid | RackSpace | VPS.net |
| $100/Month | CPU | 3x1GHz | 1Xeon | 2GHz* | 2.8GHz |
| Ram (GB) | 4.2 | 1 | 2 | 1.7 | |
| Storage (GB) | 480 | 60 | 80 | 70 | |
| B/W (GB) | 130 | 0 | 80 | 1750 | |
| $200/Month | CPU | 2xDual2Ghz | 1Xeon | 4Ghz** | 6GHz |
| Ram (GB) | 15 | 1.5 | 4 | 3.8 | |
| Storage (GB) | 1700 | 90 | 160 | 150 | |
| B/W (GB) | 100 | 206 | 80 | 3750 | |
| $500/Month | CPU | 4xDual2Ghz | 3x1Xeon | 4x2Ghz* | 3×4.8Ghz |
| Ram (GB) | 30 | 9 | 8 | 9 | |
| Storage (GB) | 3400 | 420 | 320 | 360 | |
| B/W (GB) | 550 | 0 | 500 | 9000 | |
| $1000/Month | CPU | 8xDual2Ghz | 3x3Xeon | 2xquadx2Ghz | 6×7.2Ghz |
| Ram (GB) | 60 | 12 | 16 | 28 | |
| Storage (GB) | 6800 | 520 | 620 | 1080 | |
| B/W (GB) | 1200 | 1000 | 1000 | 27000 |
* The 2Ghz is actually 1/8th of a 2xquad core 2Ghz machine
* The 4Ghz is actually 1/4th of a 2xquad core 2Ghz machine
Alas GoGrid only displays “Xeon” for the CPU, no further info seems to be divulged.
If the shoe fits
It’s become evident to me that you have to find the best fit for your needs (and future needs) in terms of price and features. It seems Amazon is the cheapest in terms of Memory and CPU, VPS.net by far the best for B/W while GoGrid throws in great freebies such as 100% SLA + Load balancing.
Here’s some quick facts to throw into the mix:
Amazon
- No persistant storage (you can use EBS or S3 for this at extra cost)
- No SLA
- Support costs $100/month or $400/month
- Lot’s of complementary services (Storage, RDB, Billing etc.)
GoGrid
- 100% SLA
- Free Load Balancer
- Free 24/7 support
Rackspace
- Free “Fanatical Support“
VPS.net
- Free Daily Backups
- Support $99/month (includes 100% SLA)
Some price comparison tools
- amazon AWS price calculator
- rack space cloud pricing
- GoGrid pricing calculator (doesn’t include bandwidth though)
Anyway, I’d be interested to hear anyone’s real experiences with hosting services in the cloud.
What application are you considering this for? I stumbled acorss these, that both look brilliant for home use. Zumodrive and Drivesafe. Check them out, love the fact I could access ALL my music anywhere!
Nice summary. It’s good to see users trying to do the apples to oranges (lizards) comparison of pricing, especially since GoGrid is on only provider to do RAM-based pricing (versus CPU). We chose the RAM-based billing model simply because it is a lot simpler to understand (you know how much RAM you have deployed…it’s harder to determine the amount of CPU cycles you might use…)
We do have a wiki page on the GoGrid site that does some brief comparisons between EC2 & GoGrid: http://wiki.gogrid.com/wiki/index.php/Billing_Model#Server.2FInstance_Price_Comparison
There is also some details on the Core allotments there. We also have some Technical FAQs that talk about Core bursting available: http://wiki.gogrid.com/wiki/index.php/Frequently_Asked_Questions#Technical_Specifications
Please be sure to check back with GoGrid over the next month or so as we will have some interesting new options available.
Thanks,
Michael Sheehan
Technology Evangelist for GoGrid
– Michael thanks for the comment. I was wondering why there was no mention of CPU power!
– Mitch (Mr Norris), I’m doing a comparison for cloud computing (virtual servers).
Another analysis of cloud computing pricing is present at theCloudTutorial.
Hi, nice post. I also tried to compare some cloud hosting options. You’re right about apples and lizards :). I tries to compare entry level cloud solutions and cheapest plans(EC2, Rackspace, ReliaCloud, Joyent). So if you’re interested, see http://sevcloud.blogspot.com/2010/05/cloud-hosting-price-comparison.html
Petr
Thanks, good research. I was wondering what the best deal is for less than $10? I’m looking for a scalable cloud for hosting standby (“warm failover”) sites for some of my customers. Just a place to keep a known-good copy of the code and latest database dumps, which can be quickly fired up and scaled to replace a downed/hacked site at another provider. The ideal price point for that would be $10 or less.
For that price range and application, you’re probably in need of slice host, of the rackspace cloud hosting option
Mr Kirkland,
You could use Cloud Hypermarket to compare cloud services very easily.
The key obstacle in assessing the cost of a cloud offer remains the lack of an industry wide measure of cloud processing capacity. We have GB for memory, TB for storage, and GB for bandwidth.
The Cloud Price Calculator (http://cloudpricecalculator.com) addresses this by adopting Amazon’s ECU as the compute metric at 1ECU = a 400 Passmark score.
Combining all the resources and dividing by price yields the Cloud Price Normalization index and a ranking of cloud offers. Interestingly, the ranking shows Amazon’s newer instances provide more value than the older ones as Amazon has rarely reduced prices after introducing an instance.
Cloudorado – IaaS cloud computing comparison is a service which does exactly this – price comparison of multiple IaaS providers. You just enter resources you need and it gives you a list of prices from multiple cloud providers.
Hi Mr Kirkland, I just came across this article!
I think thats a fair view point to costs – take a set budget and see whats the best you can get. We have recently released a Cloud Computing Price Comparison tool, its at http://www.ShopForCloud.com
The way we approached it is slightly different, we consider a system and all of its components (servers, databases, storage, data transfers and even additional costs which come from a specific deployment – e.g. software license for bring your own license AWS).
Then, this system (or deployment) is run though a simulation with the latest prices from the cloud providers to give a detailed cost report.
I’d be very interested in hearing your feedback on ShopForCloud.
Thanks,
Hassan Hosseini
ShopForCloud.com
I realize this post is 3 years old now, however I’d be interested in having you do an updated comparison. We recently launched 8 new locations for a total of 21, and also introduced a welcome kit that, to an extent, addresses your $99 support fee concern.
Is there anyway you can update a new price comparison sheet? Been 5 years.
I signed up with cloudatcost.com last year (2013). They had some startup problems. My server was down for a week. However, I’ll sign with them again. If someone finds something cheaper I’d love to know!