okrasz

Try http://www.cloudorado.com - it takes one and tree year reservations if you choose longer subscription durations (expandable panel).

Another site that is also helpful to make provider comparisons is http://www.cloudorado.com/

Amazing! I would like to see such experiment with "boot to browser" on real hardware.

This is not fully correct. It is correct that the CPU time has be been stolen, BUT nobody told that you will be the only one who will be getting a physical CPU. AWS gives you specific part of CPU and the one that is not committed to your server is seen as seal time. This is normal. Note that the seal time stays on virtually constant level. Even if your neighbor wasn't busy you would still not get additional CPU as AWS does not allow CPU bursting (using unused CPU) to other instance types than Micro, which I've read is actually running on second priority on otherwise unused CPU cycles.

This is true that they could push content. Though, there is a slight difference - a user subscribes or wants a given content. Obviously they want it to be created there, but it could help in transition of some users ... like me.

There are at least two tools which are very useful in such comparisons - http://www.cloudorado.com for pricing, and http://cloudharmony.com/ for benchmarks.

Everybody says AWS has so low margins. I don't really get it. There are really number of other providers who are much cheaper. Just see here - http://www.cloudorado.com/ . If AWS has so low margin, what margins have others?

Sounds like a price war started between Google and Amazon. Good :) Hopefully other providers will join. BTW - you can compare cloud prices at http://www.cloudorado.com

I would also suggest taking into account other cloud options. Amazon is very often not the cheapest option. Just compare it here: http://www.cloudorado.com/

While maybe more expensive then US locations, it is still very competitive compared to other (few) Australian options - http://www.cloudorado.com/#;(r:(r:5)))

Try using http://www.cloudorado.com/ . You just specify your requirements (RAM, CPU, subscription duration) and it finds appropriate options for you, including reserved, packages, etc. And it will give you price not only of AWS but other clouds a well.

Try http://www.cloudorado.com/ it does exactly that. You specify the requirements (RAM, CPU, etc) and it finds appropriate options from multiple providers.

For competition, there are already other services backed by large companies: MS Azure added VMs recently, HP Cloud, IBM Smart Cloud, Rackspace obviously. And there are also many other providers. So competition is there already. You can compare prices with http://www.cloudorado.com/ and you may already find AWS is quite often not so cheap. So why Google is supposed to change the picture that much?

You should try comparing cloud computing services with http://www.cloudorado.com/ . It calculates price for specified resources from multiple providers. And for CPU comparison based on the same benchmark across all providers, so it is using the same unit.

Take a look on this as well: http://deltacloud.apache.org/

I was more contributing to Stack Overflow than asking. Frankly I used Stack Overflow just once to ask a question for a problem I though had no solution. And surprisingly I got the solution within a day. The best resource for programmers ever!

AWS is cost effective in some scenarios while not in others. It really strongly depends on actual needs, what resources are needed, in what proportion, etc. There is an article which tries to answer if Amazon is really the cheapest provider: http://blog.cloudorado.com/2011/08/is-amazon-cheapest-cloud-...

You can compare the prices with custom configurations of multiple providers with Cloudorado - http://www.cloudorado.com.

OK, I see the point now.

OK, I might not understand what is so special about Stripe. But as for cost they charge for transactions, for typical payment channels 2.8% + ~10c (0.30 PLN), but may vary on some payment channels. There might be a minor activation cost of about $3.

In Poland (Europe) there are plenty of Stripe-like services for several years now. They mostly integrate all online payments (online wire transfers, credit cards) but also offline, where you can pay in your local shop, post office or traditional bank transfer. Virtually all banks in the Polish marked are handled. Almost no e-shop will handle payments themselves, especially that integration modules to most of e-commerce software are provided. Therefore I wonder how can it be so different in other parts of Europe?

Some samples: - http://dotpay.pl/index.php?content=&newlang=en - http://serwis.platnosci.pl/home,462.html - http://www.przelewy24.pl/en - http://www.payu.pl/ - ... and many more

But people are asking this type of questions. Look here for instance:

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1059226

To be honest I don't think there is a sharp division line between VPS or IaaS. They at least intersect. If you try to differentiate, usually you will find definitions that VPS is more like dedicated server, just that it is virtual. So they have the same pricing model - longer term (at least month), pay in advance, often not automatically provisioned. In IaaS you are are charged per actual use, usually in hour intervals. You have API to automatically create new or shut down instances when needed (scale up and down) ... and theoretically you have infinite computing resources available.

After giving a second thought I think it is not something what you are asking for. You would like to have a way to have quick look to visual price lists, without filling in anything. Something like multidimensional graph.

Very interesting! I like it :-) Do you have community of critics already? I would much more like to review such things with larger community rather than several people I can ask.

Actually I didn't thought it may cause such problem. Interesting. Actually when I think of it right now, I somehow realized that the controls have two purposes - one is setting parameters for calculation and second is filtering if criteria is not met. This in deed might not be obvious.

Just a quick thought - would dropping a provider down the list + dash instead of price + stating "provider does not support this configuration" instead of server summary. Probably a limiting resource should be also mentioned. Would it make it?

I like the meaning when you think of an analogy between number cruncher and cloud cruncher. But cloudorado gives about 240 results in Google (this post is already on top). Cloud cruncher, if written with space, gives 2 mln results - it will be difficult to go through. Wouldn't it change a balance for you?

Nice. Something like list of cheapest providers in a given resource. Goes for my list :)

BTW. Check the advanced mode - it has an option to distribute resources - just select "distribute" checkbox. It will find the cheapest option for that - it may then split over multiple servers if it is cheaper. One thing to remember though - it will always try to distribute on servers of the same type. Sometimes it would be better to have N boxes of type X and then one box of another type. I don't have it.

PaaS is much more difficult to compare in price terms, since they completely different pricing models and are difficult to translate. So at first I was thinking to address PaaS as finding tool - so you choose what language and components you need and you get a list of providers, but without prices, at least at first. Do you think it would be good enough for start?

I think I will be replacing the SmartGWT widgets with something else, due to big download size caused by that library. SmartGWT was main contributor to the slow page start. It might be a right time to review other widget options :-) But I'll definitely try the radio buttons for OS.

Very good points! I'll just comment on bandwidth and subscription, while rest goes straight on my todo list. The idea was it will be less used than other settings and I didn't want to scare people with too many settings at first ... and it was scary with 7 sliders. So at first I've just put the used values, but later did the expanding panel. Will see how many people really use it. I'm just worry not to overload it. I remember when I saw EC2 calculator for the first time - I felt really overwhelmed.

Edit: By "used values" I mean bandwidth values that where used for calculation. They were to be static. So later I came up with this solution to be somewhere in the middle.