I don't know where your Softlayer pricing comes from. We have two 2.33ghz 8 core servers with NAS for just over what you quoted for one 4 core. We're db-heavy though, and not much in the way of file serving so we're lighter on storage (we have 2 73ghz 15kRPM SCSI disks on RAID 1) but that doesn't cost much.
Most startups don't do anything that requires them to significantly scale storage, and if they do the transfer costs on Amazon are huge (though quite possibly still worth it). If you're running Dropbox or Flickr type stuff, Amazon's amazing.
AWS would be an order of magnitude more for startups like us that are basically MySQL-based. There are a lot of us out there.
Interestingly, startups that go the traditional route are limited in that they have to have enough server capacity to meet peak demand on hand 24/7, so for much of the day you're paying for idle servers. I imagine Amazon becomes a lot more price-efficient if you have a high peak to trough traffic ratio.
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I don't know where your Softlayer pricing comes from. We have two 2.33ghz 8 core servers with NAS for just over what you quoted for one 4 core. We're db-heavy though, and not much in the way of file serving so we're lighter on storage (we have 2 73ghz 15kRPM SCSI disks on RAID 1) but that doesn't cost much.
Most startups don't do anything that requires them to significantly scale storage, and if they do the transfer costs on Amazon are huge (though quite possibly still worth it). If you're running Dropbox or Flickr type stuff, Amazon's amazing.
AWS would be an order of magnitude more for startups like us that are basically MySQL-based. There are a lot of us out there.
Interestingly, startups that go the traditional route are limited in that they have to have enough server capacity to meet peak demand on hand 24/7, so for much of the day you're paying for idle servers. I imagine Amazon becomes a lot more price-efficient if you have a high peak to trough traffic ratio.