And rightly so! Amazon has, quite simply, outdone themselves this time. However before we go running through the streets lets make sure the emperor really does wear clothes.

A very common configuration of server provided by hosting companies is: 1 Server, 1Gb ram, 80Gb HDD, 1000Gb transfer. This runs $70-$80 for low end hosting, and $150-$200 for middle of the road grade hosting (Both prices per month). For the sake of our first comparison lets assume you youse every last GB of your bandwidth every month, and not a drop more.

Amazon EC2

1 Server @ $0.10/Hr (31*24*.1) = $74.40/mo
80Gb Hdd @ $0.15/Gb (80*.15) = $12.00/mo
1000Gb Xfer @ 0.20/Gb (1000*.2) = $200/mo

Total Cost Per Month: $286.40

Which is a little bit more costly than you’re used to, to be sure. Obviously the less bandwidth you use the less you pay for it. Where the *real* benifit of the EC2 service comes into play is in environments which are not bandwidth intensive, but CPU intensive. How much of a benifit this will provide remains to be seen. I am unaware of the stats on these “machines” E.G. CPU horsepower available, and RAM (as well as RAM speed) will be determinant in how useful this service is. If those (CPU/RAM) arent directly applicable terms as far as “MHZ” and “GB” go in the way that we’re used to dealing with them there will have to be some QV measure other than “Feels pretty fast.”

I predict that there will be several strategies, in the near future, for limiting the amount of bandwidth to these services (as the main cost of the service is in raw bandwidth used) Storing static content elsewhere will (i’m sure) be a key ingredient in these strategies.

I also predict that it will be a relatively short amount of time before we see some sort of beowulf or openmosix style implimentation geared directly at this service. Mark my words 🙂

More to come when I find out more — I’m *severely* interested in this… and I’m sorely dissappointed that I missed the beta (probably by only a couple of hours too…)