However, there’s a problem with EC2. A big one: performance. Bang for your buck. My friend James Golick (@jamesgolick) has often publicly talked about how crappy performance was on EC2, both in terms of CPU and IO. I knew he was right, but didn’t know how right he was really.

I recently found out about Joe’s Data Center, a low-cost dedicated hosting provider so I decided to give them a shot for a pet project I’m working on. They certainly don’t have the infrastructure of Amazon, but that’s a trade-off I can live with given the scope of my project. They have great reviews all over the interwebs so that made me feel at ease.

I leased one of the cheapest machines they are offering: a dual processor AMD Opteron SledgeHammer 2.2Ghz for $55/mo. I went crazy and added 2GB of Ram for an extra $10/mo. Total damage: $65. Roughly the same price as a small instance on EC2 (m1.small). The SledgeHammer is by today’s standards a pretty old and crappy CPU, but I figured it would be plenty for my needs.

I decided to run some benchmarks against an m1.small to see how “bad” the SledgeHammer really was. I stopped paying attention to CPUs the minute I bought my first Mac 6 or 7 years ago. All these fancy CPU names don’t mean much to me anymore.

After some Googling, I settled on UnixBench for my benchmarks. I didn’t need very precise or scientific numbers, just a ballpark to see what I was getting at Joe’s.

I WAS BLOWN AWAY!!! In a nutshell, my dedicated server is 10 times faster than an m1.small instance. TEN TIMES!!! For the same price! IO is also about 5 times faster  than EC2′s local storage. And as a bonus, I get 4GB of Ram instead of just 1.7GB.

After such a surprise, I decided to benchmark more expensive EC2 instance types to see how well my new best friend fares against my olf virtual friends. The results were equally surprising: my dedicated box is faster than a m1.large ($250/mo), faster than a m1.xlarge ($500/mo) and roughly as fast as a High CPU c1.xlarge ($500/mo). More explicitly, the c1.xlarge did ~50% better when running UnixBench with 8 threads, but the Opteron box is 50% faster when single threaded. Also, to get IO roughly equivalent to my dedicated box on EC2, you have to shell out $500/mo for a c1.xlarge. Even the m1.xlarge doesn’t cut it.

EDIT: Since publishing this article, I rented a EX 4S at Hetzner. It is effectively 58 times faster than an m1.small and has 32 GB of Ram. IO throughput is 29 times higher. All this for just $13 more a month.

Here’s a chart of my results (UnixBench index):

The raw numbers (including IO) can be found here: https://gist.github.com/1566734.

I’ll let you draw your own conclusions, but to me, it’s clear that Amazon needs to improve its performance. The bang-for-your-buck ratio of EC2 is completely out of whack.

EDIT: Title was initially “EC2 is basically one big scam”, which was a bad choice of word. I changed to word scam to rip-off, which is more appropriate I believe.

EDIT 2: Hetzner.de has a new amazing machine, the EX 4S (Intel Core i7 2600, 32 GB, 3TB RAID 1). It’s just ~$78/month so I decided to benchmark it as well. HOLY FUCKING SHIT. Check this out: Hetzner EX 4S Benchmarks. I added the numbers in the table above for comparison. Looks like we have a winner!

As promised, here are my slides.  Feel free to get in touch if you have any question about my presentation.