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