Gadgetopia

Amazon.com’s rent-a-grid: Jon Udell tries out Amazon new S3 service and is impressed, saying “it just worked.”

As the blogosphere quickly noted, the EC2 rate of a dime per instance-hour works out to $72 per month for the equivalent of a 1.7Ghz Xeon CPU with 1.75GB of RAM and 160GB of local disk. And that doesn’t include bandwidth, billed separately at the S3 rate of 20 cents per gigabyte. So for now, if you want to park one box on the Internet and leave it running indefinitely, better deals can be had from dedicated hosting providers. As the service’s name suggests, though, if you need an elastic capability that can nimbly grow or shrink, EC2 is the only game in town.

I still think $72 a month is great for a dedicated server. I think we pay about twice that, with bandwidth included. At 20-cents a gigabyte of transfer, we’d have to move almost a half-terabyte of data before it wouldn’t be worth it.