Never a truer word was spoken, developers don’t give a damn about systems their primary concern, especially in this respect is making some website look pretty, as a result maintainence suffers, bug fixes/patches/whatever don’t get applied, security gets left WIDE open and trojans usually find their way in etc etc etc etc

On the contrary. The difference is your system administrators don’t have to spend time managing hardware. But that is never greater than 30% of their manhours in any given month usually. Most of the time is spent on the software level (OS, toolchain, applications) and none of that goes away with Amazon. If anything, they will spend more time (especially 1st-year) dealing with whatever idiosyncracies exist with AWS and there are a few — not least of which is the way EC2 instances come up with different addresses everytime and don’t yet offer immutable storage.

The primary advantage is that, especially for startups, SMBs, there is no up-front hardware investment and network commitments. Past 3rd year those start to break even.

But the need for systems administrators is almost equal if slightly less than running your own infrastructure. You do not want developers running systems, that is a recipe for disaster.

I agree about the hidden costs — not having to manage your own server is a huge part of the equation. There’s a “headache factor” that isn’t accounted for in the numbers :)

Also thanks to the S3 calc. However from the discussion, the bandwidth + storage cost is not the whole picture, as you need to factor in the cost of managing those storage and pipes. S3 does all that for you. Depending on how costly a sysadmin is, S3 can be cheap or expensive.

I put together some numbers here in case you want to play with the numbers above:

http://my.instacalc.com/calc/52b29bbad9ff4abdba83bc76b945e389

When I worked at EV1, I had a customer who rented 35 servers. Later I found out he was only using 5! If he bought the extra 30 TB of bandwidth he needed without the hardware, it would have cost much more than servers + bandwidth. Not very logical, is it?

So what is real price for bandwidth? 0.01 / GB?

Hey Scott, 1 TB of data transfer is $100 on a dedicated server, and $200 on S3. But what if your traffic went up to 10 TB? You could set up 9 more servers at a total cost of $1K, but you’d have to make sure no individual machine exceeds 1TB.

That’s not really true: with layeredtech, you can rent a private switch for $10/month. The final bandwidth usage calculation will be based on the traffic that goes through the switch. It doesn’t matter which machine it came from.

That said, yes, there’s something to be said about a hassle free service like S3.

• Close to zero sysadmin involvement
• Automatically scaleable, again without operational involvement.

Those are two things a hosting package generally could not offer. The cost of human time to us exceeds the cost of machine/bandwidth.