10 bandwidth-oversold dedicated server would still turn out to be cheaper, and you get spare cycle which you can then resell :)
But you are right, Isabel, that the cost of commissioning and decommissioning servers, managing them, making sure traffic spreads across (you get 10x1Tb instead of 1x10Tb) — all these at the expense of developers and sysadmins, which would turn out to be more expensive. AWS scales up well in this case.
But then it comes down to one problem I have with the web hosting business. Why the combination of (CPU utilisation + data transferred + storage) (almost) always mark as inseparables unit? Running out of disk space? Upgrade to the next “unit” up. Running out of bandwidth? Upgrade to the next “unit” up. Running out of CPU power? Upgrade to … Yes there’s overage charges, but they are usually ridiculously expensive to be an feasible option. And you usually have applications that run out one resource before the others. Having 10 dedicated servers to serve 10Tb of data is just (1) waste of sysadmin’s time (2) waste of energy.
10 bandwidth-oversold dedicated server would still turn out to be cheaper, and you get spare cycle which you can then resell :)
But you are right, Isabel, that the cost of commissioning and decommissioning servers, managing them, making sure traffic spreads across (you get 10x1Tb instead of 1x10Tb) — all these at the expense of developers and sysadmins, which would turn out to be more expensive. AWS scales up well in this case.
But then it comes down to one problem I have with the web hosting business. Why the combination of (CPU utilisation + data transferred + storage) (almost) always mark as inseparables unit? Running out of disk space? Upgrade to the next “unit” up. Running out of bandwidth? Upgrade to the next “unit” up. Running out of CPU power? Upgrade to … Yes there’s overage charges, but they are usually ridiculously expensive to be an feasible option. And you usually have applications that run out one resource before the others. Having 10 dedicated servers to serve 10Tb of data is just (1) waste of sysadmin’s time (2) waste of energy.