Above The Cloud

Recently we were discussing pricing of cloud hosting versus traditional ‘shared hosting’ and ‘dedicated server hosting’ (in an internal work mail thread). As a consultant, I dabble in my own domains and hosting, and have often sought out the cheapest option for what I needed. This has bitten me before, having services hosted with US hosting companies with no accountability, and I now host stuff (like this blog) on Australian servers.

But I thought it somewhat hypocritical to have a blog about the cloud and not host it in the cloud as well , so I started to investigate pricing with the various providers like GoGrid and EC2. I decided that I would be more than happy to go through the pain of moving from my shared host if I could get a single virtualised server that I could throw all my domains at, for around the same price or less.

But the more I investigated, I just couldn’t see the pricing working in my favour – not for my single server scenario where scalability is not really required (I need a few more hits yet – tell your friends!). I made my calculations based on the lowest end server available, with minimal bandwidth and storage. I estimated 730 hours in a month on average. Here’s the numbers:

Ok I realise we’re not comparing apples with apples here. Each service offers differing functionality and is really designed to offer economies of scale, whereas my shared host is designed for my exact market.

So if you are looking at entry level, I guess the point is really: don’t bother.

That being said, what about at the other end, where your company can benefit from scalability and other distributed aspects of cloud computing? Well I have no answer to that, however this post on Google groups presents some interesting arguments around why cloud computing may never actually be viable. Its worth the read.

Yesterday Amazon Web Services announced they are now offering Windows instances in the EU region. This means you can now spin up a Windows Server 2003 with either IIS or SQL Server (or Linux/Unix if that’s your cup of tea) closer to your consumers (if you are a European based company). On initial inspection, it appears that the European pricing structure is approximately 10% more expensive than the US pricing. If you are interested in finding out more, there is a webinar available for free on March 17th that will focus on cloud computing in Europe.

If you haven’t seen Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) it is a virtualization provisioning service that allows you to provision a new virtual machine in the cloud from the click of a button (or a PowerShell command).

You can select from a set of existing pre-baked virtual machines, or you can upload your own. The selection screen looks like this:

When you select a machine, you then create a public and private key pair. This is used so that you can securely connect to your virtual machine. The key is saved to the user’s desktop. The next step is configuring firewall security. We do this by creating a security group that all our instances will belong in. Finally, we specify how many instances of our VM we want to spin up. It will usually take a few minutes for your instances to spin up.

Using the EC2 console you can do a lot of things including provisioning more images, arranging your IP addresses (and assigning static IPs), manage storage (which uses the Amazon Simple Storage Service [S3]), manage your individual instances (shutdown, reboot, etc), and more. The cheapest virtual machine comes in at USD$0.10 per hour, so you can happily spin up a few VM’s to play with, without breaking the bank!