GigaOm's Barb Darrow has a post on startups that have moved off of AWS.
Amazon Web Services: should you stay or should you go?
by Barb Darrow
4 HOURS AGO2 Comments
SUMMARY:Startups love the flexibility and pricing of AWS. But then again, no one cloud is right for everyone. Here are a few startups who decided to move at least some of their workloads off AWS.
$50K is the magic number that gets discussed in the article. One bigger player, not a startup is in the post with their views.
Paris Georgiallis, VP of platform operations for RMS, which builds catastrophe risk models for insurance companies, also put some credence in the $50,000 per month cut off, although he, cautioned that every user’s needs vary. “$50K a month equates to $1.8M of capital spend over 36 months. An experienced IT team can work miracles with $1.8M in infrastructure, especially in a mid-to-large enterprise,” he said via email.
RMS started out with AWS because well, it’s developers loved AWS. That appeal is Amazon’s ace in the hole. AWS “is winning the developer war much like Microsoft did in the 90s — by creating simple tools and eliminating infrastructure as a concern for developers that attraction is high.” The problem with that is developers tend to treat AWS as an all-you-can-eat-buffet which is fine — to a point. But with poor management of VMs and storage, costs can and often do skyrocket.
And, in the comment section is a reader who references his blog post of host their own server vs. softlayer in London.
The hardware experiment – London colocation
Recently we’ve been reviewing the infrastructure that powers our server and website monitoring service, Server Density, and as a result we have started an experiment looking into buying and colocating our own physical hardware.
Currently, the service is run from 2 data centers in the US with Softlayer and we’re very happy with the service. The ability to deploy new hardware or cloud VMs within hours or minutes on a monthly contract, plus the supporting services likeglobal IPs is very attractive. However, we’re now spending a significant amount of money each month which makes it worth considering running our own hardware.
