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After Amazon launched their new Micro Instances at EC2, I took a closer look at Reserved instances and I did some math. I'm currently using Linode 512 so I'll compare it to that.

Small Instance is 1.7GB RAM

pricing for Reserved instance

1 year = $227.50 = $18.95 monthly = same as 512MB Linode
3 years= $350    = $9 monthly     = 1/2 monthly price of 512MB Linode

Linode 1536

$59.95 monthly = basically same price as EC2 Launch instance (not reserved)
which is $791.4 per year

Now I don't want to say a bad word about Linode, I've been with them for about a year now and everything is really awesome.

But when I look at the math, I don't quite get it. Is there some huge hidden catch on EC2 that I'm not aware of?

I know that you have to pay for your bandwidth separately, which might get costy. Little math on that

EC2 - $0.15 per GB (first 10TB)
Linode 1536 offers 600GB bandwidth = $90 in EC2 pricing

A question comes into mind here, would I use up that much bandwidth on Small Instance?

for 100kB page size = around 6 milion page views

which is around 2 page views per second for whole month,
which is 172 800 page views per day,
since 30*24*60*60 = 2 590 000

In which case I wouldn't probably care if i pay $10 or $20.

Is my math wrong? At least from the computing power point of view, it looks like I could get 3 times as much for half the price.

1 Answer 1

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One thing you're missing. The cost of the reserved instances does not include usage. It does get you a reduced rate on usage of $0.03 per hour for Linux/Unix usage and $0.05 per hour Windows usage. (source: http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/#pricing)

Since you seem to be standardizing on cost per month, you're looking at about $22/month for 24/7 usage.

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