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Comment by teej | Hacker News Reader

Higher prices than EC2? I was hoping for something that would make Amazon cut their prices or beef up their RAM offering.

To compare:

    CloudLayer: 1 Core + 1GB RAM + 100GB SAN Storage - $99.00
    EC2: 1 Core + 1.7GB RAM + 100GB Elastic Block Storage - $82.00

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Cloudlayer also includes unlimited inbound bandwidth and 2000GB outbound. The outbound bandwidth alone would set you back $340 with Amazon.

Not just that, but when you look at the higher-end instances, CloudLayer's pricing becomes even more attractive. At $300, you get 8GB of RAM and 8 cores. Considering that Amazon's EBS has I/O usage charges, this is cheaper than Amazon's Large instance (7.5GB RAM and 2 cores with 2 compute units per core) with any I/O usage.

EDIT: SoftLayer is also saying that their base CPU is 2.0GHz rather than the 1.2GHz that Amazon's compute units are based off of.

It amazes me that in these discussions people always make a beeline right to the price, as if it not only matters but is the paramount point of concern.

I'm not exactly in the wily-nilly "VC money has caused me to lose all sense of proportion so I think I'm going to spend $20,000 on a nice big fishtank filled with tropical freaking bats" section of the market, but I look at $17 difference in these options or $8 difference in, e.g., Slicehost vs. Linode and wonder "What conceivable circumstances are there where this both matters and can not be compensated for by eating less pizza and more ramen?"

(Yeah, if you start buying dozens of them, it almost approaches real money every month. Of course, if you're buying dozens of them, you should ideally be running a business on top of them.)

I make a beeline to the prices because the last two startup companies I worked for ran dozens of instances and was running a business on top of them. I've directed tens of thousands of dollars in to EC2, that's why I'm interested.

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