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Ask HN: What makes AWS more expensive than their competitors?

4 points by hsxd ↗ HN
I was looking at migrating my website over to AWS because of their other services (autoscaling and more), but their prices are (imo) outrageous. I'm paying $80/mo at Linode for 6 CPU cores, 12GB RAM and 192GB SSD. According to the AWS calculator, a m4.xlarge (4 cores, 12GB RAM) with 40GB bandwith in/out it would cost $278. How come it costs so much more?

6 comments

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[dead] hencav
Hmm..that doesnt sound right..but its robably for all of the builtins youd get using AWS over linode. IMHO
detaro
Because you can get hundreds of those quickly, and get rid of them a few hours later, and they are in the same network as all the other AWS services. If you just want a (few) server(s) consistently, you pay for things you don't use.
mtmail
You can order and cancel Linode VMs equally fast.
jrsmith1279
It might be more expensive with this apples-to-apples comparison, but do you have any idea what the actual utilization of your linode server looks like? Unless that server is under heavy load most of the time, you would probably be much better off with a couple of smaller instances behind a load balancer. Add in auto-scaling to handle peak loads. This may still be more expensive, but now your website is much more reliable than running on a single server.

One other thing to consider: You can host static websites on S3.

hsxd
I've considered a cluster of servers before, but the server is actually under heavy load most of the time. It's running a LEMP stack and the database is fairly big.
p0rkbelly
a t2.Large instance is $76/per month. You can reduce that even further with reserved instance pricing. T2 is much more akin to what Linode offers.