I was just thinking about this. Slicehost hasn't changed their prices in the 3ish years we've been with them, but the price of computers and memory has dropped considerably.
As their profit margin expands, I hope Slicehost will lower their prices, too (and if they don't I suspect that'll be a window for someone else).
They're still growing really fast. Lowering their prices, besides reducing profit, would make them have to work harder at scaling. I don't think they're going to do it until growth levels off.
Whether it's cheap or not is dependent on the amount of data you transfer, at $.10 / G they will charge you $33 / month for a continuous 1Mbit link (328 G of data traffic).
If you're a smaller user then the price is much higher still.
For comparison, buy bandwidth in bulk and you can expect to end somewhere between $3 and $5.
As long as those bandwidth prices don't come down I can't make the figures work for web stuff, unless it is something that periodically needs a large number of machines. That's when it makes sense.
Yep. That was my point, if you want to get to $.10 you're in the highest tier, so they make you pay through the nose.
And the 150 TB @ $17900 works out to a shade under $.12 / G.
But it doesn't matter which 'tier' you end up in, it's 6 times the going rate, the only advantage is you don't have the write-off on the hardware, that's amazons problem.
But if you push significant bandwidth then that's a minor part of your costs anyway.
I really wonder if there is anybody that does significant bandwidth right now that has their data served from a cloud service and what the rationale is behind that.
Convenience is great, but if it affects your bottom line so strongly then it is probably wiser to do your own thing. Even on leased hardware (such as rackspace or theplanet) you are still off cheaper, a 10MB flat rate machine with a 2GHz cpu, 1G of ram, 2x200G drives sold for $200 / month two years ago. I don't know what the going rate is today but I would expect it to be cheaper.
Oh, I agree. There are nice unlimited (NIC saturation at least) deals for both inbound and outbound, you'd be insane to use EC2 for this level of traffic.
I run multiple servers off of rackspace's cloud, at their lowest tier which costs 1.5 cents per hour, or roughly $11.00/mo +bandwidth. It's such a cheap solution and is more than sufficient for the hosting that I use them for. They've surpassed expectations from day one.
Used to use webfaction, which was pretty solid too, but moved away due to some flexibility issues.
As their profit margin expands, I hope Slicehost will lower their prices, too (and if they don't I suspect that'll be a window for someone else).