Why is it that EC2 prices are dropping, but not VPS?

11 points by iworkforthem 14 years ago | 9 comments

Anyone care to explain?

dclaysmith 14 years ago |

I think the simple answer would be economies of scale. As more and more customers sign up, they can drive their per-server costs down significantly. Their labor cost per customer would also decrease significantly. Meanwhile, your run-of-the-mill VPS provider is sweating decisions like "do I rent another rack" or "can I afford to hire another engineer"...

toomuchtodo 14 years ago | |

Amazon also gets to subsidize their AWS business with their primary business: retail logistics. Organizations that do hosting as their primary business do not have this luxury.

ahi 14 years ago |

Could this be rephrased as, "Why is linode so damn expensive?" I don't know the answer to that question. Maybe Hurricane Electric is both unreliable and expensive.

TheSmoke 14 years ago | |

you can always check out intovps.com.

hcho 14 years ago |

I am paying about $18 per month for my linode instance. I am not going to migrate to $10 a month VPS for a saving of $8 per month. Linode knows this and is under no pressure to drop their prices.

It would be a totally different story of mu hosting needs costed me $1000s.

dedward 14 years ago | |

yup....lus linod is notthe same as ec2. linode has zn awesome track re ordnfirmthings it is go od at,,,m,nthe pricebis right.

iworkforthem 14 years ago |

Hardware are getting cheaper & faster. The same is with Storage. Virtualization Tools & OS are mostly free. Worst if I compare the US VPS prices against those in Europe. E.g HostEurope or Leaseweb.

VPS just dun make any sense.

glimcat 14 years ago |

Conditions inside Amazon don't necessarily reflect the state of every business in the industry.

Nicolas___ 14 years ago |

You have to be more specific about the VPS part of your question...