I love the concept of cloud hosting, but the numbers just don’t work. A few years ago I did a calculation of CPU power vs. Amazon compute units.

The bottom line was if you needed a server online 24/7 it was just not cost effective. I know Amazon has a lot of clients and people can make it work – but I can’t get the numbers to work.

I tried again today to look at some numbers. I’ve got a pair of email servers and in the last 24 hours consumed about 74gigs of bandwidth. Amazon now has free inbound bandwidth so lets cost only outbound bandwidth at 35 gigs per day, or 1050gigs per month.

Just for bandwidth alone Amazon would charge $124.20 a month.

That does not include the TWO servers that I would need to pay for. The servers are SuperMicro i5 based machines, not exactly sure where the performance would line up with Amazon cloud instances but I will estimate conservatively at c3.large class servers which have 3.7gb ram and 7 ECU units. Lets check the numbers under a long term contract with 24/7 usage.

The two Windows based servers would cost $270.68 per month.

How about adding DNS to the list. I am including a snapshot from one of my DNS servers (I have 4 total), you can see it has been online for 32 days and has processed 115,937,886 requests or 3,623,058 requests per day.

The DNS service (Route 53) would cost $58.50 per month.

So lets recap:

Servers: 270.68
Bandwidth: 124.20
DNS: 58.50 (I actually have 4 of them, not just one)

For a grand total for the month of $453.38.

Hate to say it Amazon, but I pay about $100 to host my two servers every month. The DNS software was a one time cost, years ago. The servers are SSD RAID based with 8gb of ram, total cost was about $1000 each and should last at least 3 years but probably much longer ($27.75 a month if they last 3 years).

So the numbers for a cloud based service still do not work for me 🙁