Comments on: Rent vs. Buy (or EC2 vs. building your own iron)

By: Steve

Steve — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 14:13:48 +0000

Your last two paragraphs sum up the awesomeness that is ec2 for me. Time & flexibility.

By: Jon Gilkison

Jon Gilkison — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 00:49:44 +0000

Well, first things first: You don’t ever host on EC2, you compute on it. The bandwidth costs for EC2 are prohibitive in that regard when compared to Slicehost, Linode, etc.

Second things second: If Atwood wasn’t so afraid of the command line, he’d be saving himself a shit load of money. There is no conceivable advantage of the .NET platform for StackOverflow beyond Atwood’s comfort with those particular development tools.

Thirds things third: In this day and age, the costs savings of colocating metal versus spreading it out over a semi-cloud solution (slicehost, linode, etc.) is negligible at best. Factor in maintenance (time and hardware) and it’s even less compelling.

By: Humberto Oliveira

Humberto Oliveira — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 00:45:15 +0000

What if we could use the EC2 as a backup server, wouldn’t that be the best of the both worlds?

Create an instance in EC2, turn it on from time to time to update the SQL Server through log shipping and keep it off until the next disaster occurs.

I don’t how to implement that, as a matter of fact, I don’t even know if that’s possible.

Any ideas?

By: Robert Accettura

Robert Accettura — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 00:42:55 +0000

EC2 is great for when you need temporary computing, or need to scale without the funds for an initial investment. Other than that it’s likely extra cost with little gain for most people.

For example NYT used them to process old data of theirs. A brilliant job since this would have taken forever on limited hardware but using EC2 you could charge it to your corporate credit card and essentially save your IT budget:
http://open.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/11/01/self-service-prorated-super-computing-fun/