As part of any service provider’s work, particularly one focusing on cost sensitive areas (our clients are mostly operating in Africa), is ensuring we get the best value out of our service providers.
Using cloud services has been the obvious choice for us for some time, providing isolation between clients, (near) instant scalability, and the flexibility to spin up and down test instances and deployments.
As part of our recent work to find the best cloud hosting provider for a mid-size site (ca. 10 mill page views/month), the advantages of a multi cloud strategy soon became obvious.
I’m sharing some of our findings here in the hope that this might help others, as I had little luck in finding similar figures / stats myself before getting started.
The three/four providers evaluated were AWS, Rackspace, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure (which quickly proved the wrong choice for us so is dropped from some of the below).
COST PER CPU
Note: There are a lot of different instance types on offer. The instance types selected where there isn’t a clear match may not be the one you would have chosen. Generally, we’ve tried to select the cheapest instance with at least as much CPU power and memory.
Below you’ll find numbers and graphs based on some of each of the providers’ standard instance types
1. AMAZON INSTANCE TYPES
| Amazon | Rackspace | AWS 1y | CPU | MEM | ||
| t2.nano | 4.60 | 10.98 | 27.01 | 3.65 | 0.5 | 1 |
| t2.micro | 9.49 | 21.95 | 27.01 | 7.30 | 1 | 1 |
| t2.small | 18.25 | 24.55 | 54.02 | 14.60 | 1 | 2 |
| t2.medium | 36.00 | 49.10 | 108.04 | 29.20 | 2 | 4 |
| t2.large | 72.72 | 59.48 | 108.04 | 58.40 | 2 | 8 |
| m4.large | 85.68 | 59.48 | 108.04 | 65.70 | 2 | 8 |
| t2.xlarge | 145.44 | 118.96 | 216.08 | 116.80 | 4 | 16 |
| m4.xlarge | 171.36 | 118.96 | 216.08 | 131.40 | 4 | 16 |
2. GOOGLE INSTANCE TYPES
| Amazon | Rackspace | AWS 1y | CPU | MEM | ||
| n1-standard-1 | 18.25 | 26.36 | 58.40 | 14.60 | 1 | 4 |
| n1-standard-2 | 73.73 | 52.72 | 116.80 | 58.40 | 2 | 8 |
| n1-standard-4 | 147.46 | 105.44 | 233.60 | 116.80 | 4 | 16 |
| n1-standard-8 | 346.75 | 210.87 | 467.20 | 262.80 | 8 | 32 |
| n1-standard-16 | 693.50 | 421.75 | 934.40 | 526.33 | 16 | 64 |
3. RACKSPACE INSTANCE TYPES
| Amazon | Rackspace | AWS 1y | RSUK £ | ||
| 1 CPU – 1 GB | 9.49 | 21.95 | 27.01 | 7.30 | 25.18 |
| 2 CPU – 2 GB | 36.50 | 43.91 | 54.02 | 29.20 | 50.35 |
| 4 CPU – 4 GB | 147.46 | 87.81 | 108.04 | 116.80 | 100.70 |
| 8 CPU – 8 GB | 294.92 | 175.63 | 216.08 | 234.33 | 201.41 |
RSUK is the pricing in GBP from Rackspace UK converted into USD at the daily rate of 14 April 2017.
CONCLUSION
For virtual servers, Google seems to offer the best value with more than 2 CPUs while Amazon offers the best value with 2 CPUs or below.
It’s slightly more complex than that, of course.
The performance of the clouds vary a bit as well, but in our experience if anything this favours Google.
Some services are not available on all clouds — for example, we use Amazon for transcoding, on the other hand we can’t use Amazon’s CloudFront due to poor coverage in Africa. Rackspace offer a decent deal on Akamai CDN services.
Generally, the best approach seems to be to pick and mix.
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