I put together a cloud hosting comparison chart on Zoho DB. You can also view the full DB and some reports on Zoho DB. I need to figure out better ways to visualize the data, so let me know if you have any ideas. I had to makesome assumptions to try and make the comparisons somewhat equal.
Let me know what you think.
Mosso just announced they are going to be offering cloud servers at $10.95 / Month. That is about half of the cost of of the competition. This cloud service is based off their acquisition last year of Slicehost. It will be interesting to see how similar this offering is to Slicehost. They have a good reputation for excellent customer service, so hopefully they will keep this up.
What else was interesting was they have updated Jungle Disk to support Cloud Files. The cost currently only includes the monthly storage cost and there is no cost for data transfer. That would make the price much lower than storing files in Amazon S3 through Jungle Disk. The cost for direct use of Cloud Files though does include fees for data transfer.
Update: I just realized that the cost of Cloud Servers does not include data transfer. They charge $0.08 / GB for bandwidth in and $0.22 / GB transfer out. If you assumed 50 GB in and 100 GB out that would add $26 to the total cost. So it is not as competitive as I originally thought.
Amazon today announced EC2 Reserved Instances. This allows companies to pay a one-time fee upfront for a guaranteed reserved instance:
Amazon Web Services Blog: Announcing Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances
This brings the price down of using EC2 for hosting a web site, similar to using a VPS. For comparison we put together a chart showing how the price compares to other major VPS providers. We made a number of assumptions to calculate the monthly price for Amazon EC2. I have also published more comparisons on this Google Doc.
| Hosting Provider | Monthly Cost | Ram | Storage | Transfer |
| Amazon Reserved Instance * | $70.68 | 1741MB | 160GB | 50 GB Data In / 100 GB Data Out |
| Slicehost | $70 | 1024MB | 40GB | 400GB |
| Linode | $59.95 | 1080MB | 36GB | 600GB |
| RimU ** | $67.95 | 1150MB | 16GB | 150GB |
| Media Temple (gs) | $80 | 1024MB*** | 100GB | 1TB |
| Media Temple (dv) | $67.95 | 512MB | 40GB | 1.5TB |
| GoGrid **** | $149.98 | 512MB? | 10GB | 200GB |
One of the challenges with making these comparisons is each of the services have slightly different offerings and different hardware configurations. For example GoGrid does offer Hardware Load Balancing, but many websites won’t need this. Some of the services have more polished control panels and others appeal more to Linux geeks whole like full control.
If we were to pick a winner today it would be Linode. They have several unique offerings such as disk images that allow custom partition schemes, configuration profiles to store muliple profiles and the Linode Shell that allows out of band access to your instance for emergency repairs. We are planning to change our hosting provider soon to Linode and will post a review shortly.
Let us know what you think.
* For Amazon we calculated the price as the base price per month (approx. $27/month) plus the hourly cost of keeping the server running 24/7 in a month. The calculation then is (30 days * 24 hours) * ($0.03 per hour) = $21.6. The base cost then is ($27.083 + $21.6) = $48.68. On top of that we calculated approx data transfer as Data In (50GB * .10) = $5 and Data Out at (100GB * .17) = $17 for a total data transfer cost of $22.
** For RimU we choose the customized option to add extra storage and transfer space
*** Media Temple (gs) Ram was based on the advanced specs for GridContainers.
**** For GoGrid we used the Business Cloud PrePaid Plan of $99.99 / month plus $49.99 / month for 200GB of outbound transfer
I have been working with transactional databases for a long time, so I was very sceptical about Amazon SimpleDB at first. The most obvious short coming is that it is non-transactional. It also uses what Amazon calls “eventual consistency”, that is multiple copies of the data are stored in different places so it takes time for the data to propagate to all storage locations. That means the data will eventually be consistent, but an immediate read might not show the change. This could lead to the classic database problem of dirty reads. This obviously will not work for any application requiring data consistency; the ACID properties of traditional databases.
Where I think SimpleDB could be useful is that it more easily maps into an object model. This could be ideal for developing rapid prototypes. I have developed countless applications that where a proof of concept and just need a basic data store. Often in these cases it would be nice to not have to worry about mapping the data to a relational data model; the impedance mismatch problem.
To test the service out I built a simple GWT client for administering SimpleDB. Using the Java library it was very easy to create new data models and query a domain. The main problem I did see was the speed of access. Basic operations like deleting a domain took several seconds. This obviously would not work for production systems.
Overall I would say for the right applications SimpleDB could be beneficial.
