Be Careful When Comparing AWS Costs…

Earlier today, GigaOM published a cost comparison of self-hosting vs. hosting on AWS. I wanted to bring to your attention a few quick issues that we saw with this analysis:

Lower Costs in Other AWS Regions – The comparison used the AWS costs for the US West (San Francisco) Region, ignoring the fact that EC2 pricing in the US East (Northern Virginia) and US West (Oregon) is lower ($0.76 vs. $0.68 for On-Demand Extra Large Instances).

Three Year Reserved Instances – The comparison used one year Reserved Instances, but a three year amortization schedule for the self-hosted hardware. You save over 22% by using three year Reserved Instances instead of one year Reserved Instances, and the comparison is closer to apples-to-apples.

Heavy Utilization Reserved Instances – The comparison used a combination of Medium Utilization Reserved Instances and On-Demand Instances. Given the predictable traffic pattern in the original post, a blend of Heavy and Light Utilization Reserved Instances would reduce your costs, and still give you the flexibility to easily scale up and scale down that you don’t get with traditional hosting.

Load Balancer (and other Networking) Costs – The self-hosted column does not include the cost of a redundant set of load balancers. They also need top-of-rack switches (to handle what is probably 5 racks worth of servers) and a router.

No Administrative Costs – Although the self-hosted model specifically excludes maintenance and administrative costs, it is not reasonable to assume that none of the self-hosted hardware will fail in the course of the three year period. It is also dangerous to assume that labor costs will be the same in both cases, as labor can be a significant expense when you are self-hosting.

Data Transfer Costs – The self-hosted example assumes a commit of over 4 Gbps of bandwidth capacity. If you have ever contracted for bandwidth & connectivity at this scale, you undoubtedly know that you must actually commit to a certain amount of data transfer, and that your costs will change significantly if you are over or under your commitment.

We did our own calculations taking in to account only the first four issues listed above and came up with a monthly cost for AWS of $56,043 (vs. the $70,854 quoted in the article). Obviously each workload differs based on the nature of what resources are utilized most.

These analyses are always tricky to do and you always need to make apples-to-apples cost comparisons and the benefits associated with each approach. We’re always happy to work with those wanting to get in to the details of these analyses; we continue to focus on lowering infrastructure costs and we’re far from being done.

— Jeff;