Amazon is expensive when you do an apples to apples comparison to other hosting options at a small scale.
It's value starts to appear when you are operating at a scale high enough that you start hiring people to futz with servers.
Enterprises love Amazon for a few reasons:
- Cost containment -- all costs for a projet can be borne by the project, and go away at the end.
- Cost savings -- Amazon costs are easily a third of what large enterprises charge back for similar services.
- Avoiding internal IT challenges -- Amazon gives people who own applications or businesses to avoid many of the bureaucratic hoops that they must deal with internally. (Remember the story about the NY Times guy who digitized all of the back issues of the Times? Getting the resources for that project would take months the normal way.)
- Speed -- Physical server provisioning times as long as 8 weeks aren't uncommon. VMs can take days. Amazon obviously doesn't have that issue.
- Performance isn't an issue -- EBS sucks, but so do the overcommitted VMWare clusters and shared SAN at a large company. At least it doesn't cost $1.50/GB/mo (benchmark cost for enterprise SAN a couple of years ago.)
For a startup that can run the business on a half dozen boxes, it is definitely more expensive. But... if you are expecting lots of growth, you do need to make sure that you choose a colo/hosting place that has the ability to scale up as well.
It's value starts to appear when you are operating at a scale high enough that you start hiring people to futz with servers.
Enterprises love Amazon for a few reasons: - Cost containment -- all costs for a projet can be borne by the project, and go away at the end. - Cost savings -- Amazon costs are easily a third of what large enterprises charge back for similar services. - Avoiding internal IT challenges -- Amazon gives people who own applications or businesses to avoid many of the bureaucratic hoops that they must deal with internally. (Remember the story about the NY Times guy who digitized all of the back issues of the Times? Getting the resources for that project would take months the normal way.) - Speed -- Physical server provisioning times as long as 8 weeks aren't uncommon. VMs can take days. Amazon obviously doesn't have that issue. - Performance isn't an issue -- EBS sucks, but so do the overcommitted VMWare clusters and shared SAN at a large company. At least it doesn't cost $1.50/GB/mo (benchmark cost for enterprise SAN a couple of years ago.)
For a startup that can run the business on a half dozen boxes, it is definitely more expensive. But... if you are expecting lots of growth, you do need to make sure that you choose a colo/hosting place that has the ability to scale up as well.