Amazon EC2 is too expensive for startups
I’ve just read this article regarding the Amazon Web Services Startup Challenge and I was all eager to give EC2 a try. To be honest, I have heard about Amazon Web Services for quite sometime now, but finally I thought it was time to have a look. The motivation was the fact that I have tried Stax Cloud and noticed it is build on top of Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud). I quickly signed up using my existing account hoping there would be a trial or some sort of free access for developers, I was wrong. As soon as I tried to signup for EC2 & S3 I was asked to confirm my credit card details, so I stopped there and had a quick look at the pricing.
Using Amazon’s pricing calculator I tried to enter the same specifications offered by a PoundHost A2 dedicated server and to my shock Amazon EC2 monthly pricing was three times that of PoundHost A2 dedicated server. So what I don’t understand is how would a startup be able to afford using a more expensive service such as EC2?, may be it’s the buzz word ‘Cloud’ and lots of cash coming out of VC funding rounds!
Personally I think Amazon is still got a great deal to do in regards to pricing if they want to compete with the dedicated server hosting market.
January 6th, 2009 at 06:47 am
Stax is free during the beta, but we still believe that we can offer options for bringing monthly charges for EC2 inline with standard hosting by taking advantage of application elasticity.
To get an application deployed on EC2 24×7, you need to allocate a full EC2 server for the month, which will cost you $70 at a minimum. However, with an elastic platform like Stax, your Java applications can be deployed for 24×7 operations, in a way that allows your application to only use a portion of a server during low-use hours, or none at all during completely idle periods.
If your application load is always steady-state, cloud elasticity won’t help you much, but if it has peak/non-peak load variation, it could dramatically reduce your costs since you won’t need to pay for a fully dedicated server all the time, which offering you the flexibility of elastic scalability as your load grows overtime.