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Comment by jread | Hacker News Reader

EC2 on-demand/hourly to Hetzner monthly pricing is not really an apples-to-apples comparison. EC2 reserve pricing is more similar and about 1/2 or less of on-demand fees. Hetzner is still cheaper, and if all you need is a low cost dedicated server w/local disks and bandwidth, this is a great choice - but AWS provides an entire ecosystem of services including configurable EBS and S3 storage, as well as more diverse and scalable purchase/provisioning options.

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Having a large ecosystem of services should be a reason AWS is cheaper since on average you'll spend money on those integrations -- not a reason to pay a premium.

Increased complexity leads to increased overhead costs. A bare metal instance is going to be cheaper to maintain than a full-service instance that interfaces with a robust ecosystem (even if that instance doesn't use any of it).

Doesn't this discount the considerable economy-of-scale advantage that Amazon should have?

Not when Amazon's scaling benefits are used to mostly benefit themselves.

Well that's a different point. Complexity, economies of scale, and high-prices charged by an incumbent market-leader, are three different matters.

You're assuming the bare metal instance doesn't nearly have the same economies of scale.

At ~10x the prices hourly is only competitive if you have extreme traffic spikes. Reserve costs less, but it’s still ~4x the price of pure hardware.

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