Ive said this a few times earlier on. The main benefit to Cloud hosting is hourly billing. Unless you are utilizing this feature extensively you will almost always be better off in a dedicated/colo enviorment. You will get more power/bandwidth for less money.
That being said, there are some edge cases. If you make extreme use of additional feature of amazon ( SDB/EIP/etc.. ) then the Amazon "bundle" could make it a better situation for you.
Im only writing this because I see so many HN'ers talk about "Well, I can spin up a extra large instance at any moment to handle extra traffic!" - The fact is, most of you dont do that. And even if you do, you would likely save money just being on a dedicated anyways. Cloud hosting is really for "overflow" and nothing more.
There are other significant benefits to cloud hosting. Specifically on AWS:
* Storage flexibility with EBS and S3
* instant migration abilities between instance sizes
* backup and restore
* provisioning of resources when needed
* staging, dev, test resources
SDB and ELB usage certainly aren't edge cases, they are core to many many deployments.
The provisioning flexibility alone is a tremendous benefit considering that most highly trafficked Web properties are not static environments. They constantly innovate and have demands for infrastructure that can really be challenging in a dedicated environment.
In our case, we use AWS extensively, but where we have been able to carve out a "static" set of resources, we do and host with 100TB.com - simply because they offer so much bandwidth for cheap and those static resources pump out a lot of bandwidth which isn't cost effective on AWS for day to day operations.
Edit: from a financial standpoint, if you choose to purchase reserved instances for AWS, hosting becomes far closer in costs benefits to dedicated environments.
Agreed. If you use the extra features of amazon, like you mentioned then it can be worth the cost.
I was strictly speaking on a financial basis. Hourly billing only pays off if you use it to constantly scale. If you are running your servers 24/7 then chances are you are better off on dedicated for some portion of your infrastructure.
* This doesnt apply for tiny sites that can get by running on a tiny linode for 20$ a month. However, once you are paying 100$/mo, every month, then this holds much more true.
At the risk of being an obnoxious pedant, "nontrivial amount of work" is, to me, a non sequitur. Trivial describes the complexity of work, not the amount. Work is either well understood (trivial) or not well understood (non-trivial). In either case the work effort itself can be variable.
I can't comment on the accuracy of your comment otherwise. Those who can, write content. Those who can't, nitpick semantics :)
If you want to be a hardline language pendant about it, "trivial" describes neither an amount, nor complexity but commonness.
But either way, yeah, you're being obnoxious because idiomatically "trivial" when applied to work fits fine and is easily understood for all of these scenarios (complexity, amount, and uncommon vs common).
I certainly wouldn't consider collecting all the trash in the LA metro area "trivial work" by the well-understood meaning of the phrase even though it is commonly done and it is easily broken down into non-complex steps.
This is only the case if you're utilizing all your hardware. A huge advantage of cloud hosting is that you can buy a slice of a machine. I run all my new experimental stuff on $20-per-month Linode instances, and once they get big enough that they need more hardware, they can graduate to whatever. You probably won't need 8 cores and 32GB of RAM and a half TB of RAID-5'd 10k RPM SCSI hard drives for a long time, but you're still paying for it.
At large scale, you're probably better off with a baseline dedicated + cloud for overflow, absolutely.
I forgot this point. Its absolutely correct, you cannot beat the price point for VPS if your stuff can run on a 20$ plan. However, once you get over that hump.. say 100$/month it becomes obvious that dedicated pays off in spades.
That being said, there are some edge cases. If you make extreme use of additional feature of amazon ( SDB/EIP/etc.. ) then the Amazon "bundle" could make it a better situation for you.
Im only writing this because I see so many HN'ers talk about "Well, I can spin up a extra large instance at any moment to handle extra traffic!" - The fact is, most of you dont do that. And even if you do, you would likely save money just being on a dedicated anyways. Cloud hosting is really for "overflow" and nothing more.
Again, Hourly billing- Cloud hostings biggest advantage.