You fail to mention rack rental fees and network IO fees, and maintenance (parts replacement, parts shipping/handling, cost of downtime, maintenance staff salaries).
We're talking about a difference of $10k USD per instance per year.
You'll want at least two for redundancy so that's $20k spare change if you go dedicated. That buys quite lot of rackspace, network IO and spare parts.
Staff salaries don't factor in because if you need storage of that scale you can't do without a competent admin either way (the $20k comfortably pay for a fully managed colo with remote hands).
Needless to say most deployments of that size will need more than two boxes, at which point the markup tips entirely into wtf-territory. Note my calculation was really generous here, too. In reality you get steep hardware discounts on top that make amazon look even worse, and you can buy boxes with higher storage density for an even better $/GB.
My impression of EC2 and S3 has always been that they're appropriate for meeting short term needs (to handle extra load or to function as backups), but that's about it.
Their long-term pricing is terrible compared to other options, and they offer few benefits. At the low end, standard VPSes are much cheaper. At the high end, never mind colo, there are dedicated and even managed servers which offer far better value.
The Amazon pricing is similar to chargeback models in large enterprises. Actually it's cheaper, because big enterprises typically require the you use SAN at $5-15 per GB/mo.
Okay. So instead of a 4x markup, it's now a 3x markup when you include the colo box space in a rack, power, b/w, a couple of spare parts on hand, and the extra couple of hundred to pay the staff at the datacenter (on call 24/7, 365) when those spare parts are put to use.
Comments
You fail to mention rack rental fees and network IO fees, and maintenance (parts replacement, parts shipping/handling, cost of downtime, maintenance staff salaries).
We're talking about a difference of $10k USD per instance per year.
You'll want at least two for redundancy so that's $20k spare change if you go dedicated. That buys quite lot of rackspace, network IO and spare parts.
Staff salaries don't factor in because if you need storage of that scale you can't do without a competent admin either way (the $20k comfortably pay for a fully managed colo with remote hands).
Needless to say most deployments of that size will need more than two boxes, at which point the markup tips entirely into wtf-territory. Note my calculation was really generous here, too. In reality you get steep hardware discounts on top that make amazon look even worse, and you can buy boxes with higher storage density for an even better $/GB.
My impression of EC2 and S3 has always been that they're appropriate for meeting short term needs (to handle extra load or to function as backups), but that's about it.
Their long-term pricing is terrible compared to other options, and they offer few benefits. At the low end, standard VPSes are much cheaper. At the high end, never mind colo, there are dedicated and even managed servers which offer far better value.
The Amazon pricing is similar to chargeback models in large enterprises. Actually it's cheaper, because big enterprises typically require the you use SAN at $5-15 per GB/mo.
Okay. So instead of a 4x markup, it's now a 3x markup when you include the colo box space in a rack, power, b/w, a couple of spare parts on hand, and the extra couple of hundred to pay the staff at the datacenter (on call 24/7, 365) when those spare parts are put to use.