15% price cut in EC2 instances, effective Nov 1
aws.amazon.com
aws.amazon.com
As their profit margin expands, I hope Slicehost will lower their prices, too (and if they don't I suspect that'll be a window for someone else).
Used to use webfaction, which was pretty solid too, but moved away due to some flexibility issues.
If you're a smaller user then the price is much higher still.
For comparison, buy bandwidth in bulk and you can expect to end somewhere between $3 and $5.
As long as those bandwidth prices don't come down I can't make the figures work for web stuff, unless it is something that periodically needs a large number of machines. That's when it makes sense.
That is the inbound price, the outbound price (where you will more likely have an issue) is .17/GB
(1st 10TB @ .17 = $1700; next 40TB @ .13 = $5200; next 100TB @ .11 = $11000)
And the 150 TB @ $17900 works out to a shade under $.12 / G.
But it doesn't matter which 'tier' you end up in, it's 6 times the going rate, the only advantage is you don't have the write-off on the hardware, that's amazons problem.
But if you push significant bandwidth then that's a minor part of your costs anyway.
I really wonder if there is anybody that does significant bandwidth right now that has their data served from a cloud service and what the rationale is behind that.
Convenience is great, but if it affects your bottom line so strongly then it is probably wiser to do your own thing. Even on leased hardware (such as rackspace or theplanet) you are still off cheaper, a 10MB flat rate machine with a 2GHz cpu, 1G of ram, 2x200G drives sold for $200 / month two years ago. I don't know what the going rate is today but I would expect it to be cheaper.