[GLLUG] Amazon EC2 vs Hetzner dedicated box. Am I missing the obvious?

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Wed, Aug 06, 2014 at 12:41:18AM +0100, gvim wrote:
> I'm a bit green when it comes to the whole cloud compute thing but I
> just read a recommendation that a Rails app which expects
> significant traffic should be hosted on an Amazon EC2 m3.medium. So
> that would get me:
> 
> 1 vCPU
> 3.75 GB RAM
> 4GB SSD storage
> 
> ... for $0.077 per hour = £398/year.

JLMS already made the central points about cloud -- flexibility and
the cost of your time and missed revenue.

I'd like to add that to run a small site, cloud can scale *down* too.
If you site is only going to have a handful of users then the machine
you quote above could be overpowered.  You'd be better off with a
smaller and cheaper option (or even one of the free tiers).

If your expectation of "significant traffic" does come true later, the
cloud lets you easily scale back up.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones
Red Hat