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).

* 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.

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