Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud
-> http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html?node=201590011
also see my posting on Amazon's Simple Storage Service a.k.a. S3
$73 (=57€) per machine per month. Each machine is supposed to be comparable with a 1.7Ghz Xeon with 1.75GB of RAM and 160GB disk.
Soon we all will be able to chant "we have all those machines" :-)
I think the prices are very competitive, even in comparison with Hetzner.
But as we all know, the tough part of scaling is not filling out the online form for the new root server (which becomes a API-call with Amazon's new service), but rather to design/implement the distribution of processing over multiple machines and to manage all those machines. And with this new service (as opposed to their storage solution) this will still remain your task.
So, if you boil it down, there is just one major advantage:
* you get machines that have access to a completely free scalable storage solution (i.e. Amazon's S3)
The only other "service highlight", that can not be fullfilled by other hosting companies, is that you can change the number of machines faster (it takes just a couple of minutes to get that extra server up and running, instead of 2 work-days as it is with Hetzner). And honestly, I don't think that there are that many organizations out there, who need to scale that fast.
By the way: It seems that Hetzner has completely dropped its traffic limitations! I guess the overhead for charging extra traffic simply exceeded the incoming money for them.
also see my posting on Amazon's Simple Storage Service a.k.a. S3
$73 (=57€) per machine per month. Each machine is supposed to be comparable with a 1.7Ghz Xeon with 1.75GB of RAM and 160GB disk.
Soon we all will be able to chant "we have all those machines" :-)
I think the prices are very competitive, even in comparison with Hetzner.
But as we all know, the tough part of scaling is not filling out the online form for the new root server (which becomes a API-call with Amazon's new service), but rather to design/implement the distribution of processing over multiple machines and to manage all those machines. And with this new service (as opposed to their storage solution) this will still remain your task.
So, if you boil it down, there is just one major advantage:
* you get machines that have access to a completely free scalable storage solution (i.e. Amazon's S3)
The only other "service highlight", that can not be fullfilled by other hosting companies, is that you can change the number of machines faster (it takes just a couple of minutes to get that extra server up and running, instead of 2 work-days as it is with Hetzner). And honestly, I don't think that there are that many organizations out there, who need to scale that fast.
By the way: It seems that Hetzner has completely dropped its traffic limitations! I guess the overhead for charging extra traffic simply exceeded the incoming money for them.
michi - 28.Aug 2006 15:34 - technisches
Michi a.k.a. 'Michael Platzer' is one of the 
