On 12/11/2012 8:28 AM, Mihai Popa wrote:
> I guess Chris was right, I have to better understand the usage pattern
> and do some testing of my own.
> I was just hoping my hunch about Amazon being the better alternative
> would be confirmed, but this does not
> seem to be the case; most of you recommend purchasing a box.
>
Amazon (or another PG cloud provider such as Heroku) is a great choice
if you want to do some sizing tests.
However, beware that if you need big instances running for more than a
week or two, you may spend as much in fees as it would have cost to buy
a big machine outright.
Cloud services are highly economic where you need resources that are
significantly _less_ than a present-day physical machine provides. For
example I have a VM with 500MB at Rackspace that I can use to run Nagios
to check on my physical servers, located in a different state on
different peering. I think that costs something like $15/mo. I couldn't
locate any kind of physical box in a new data center for anything like
that little. But where we need all the resources provided by the biggest
box you can buy today (and several of those), it is an order of
magnitude cheaper to buy them and pay for colo space. Similarly, if I
needed machines for only a short time (to test something, for example),
cloud hosting is a nice option vs having a big pile of metal in the
corner of the office that you don't know what to do with...
Finally, note that there is a middle-ground available between cloud
hosting and outright machine purchase -- providers such as Linode and
SoftLayer will sell physical machines in a way that gives much of the
convenience of cloud hosting, but with the resource dedication and
consistency of performance of physical machines. Still not as cheap as
buying your own machines of course, if you need them long-term.
