I upvoted because I love HN comments that offer solutions. That said . . . how can you charge half as much as Amazon for the same service and make a profit. I assume their margins are not that fat, so what are you cutting that they offer? Or else what secret have you discovered that no one knows? I guess since this is your business there's a chance that you won't answer, but I'm curious.

AWS uses high end, expensive enterprise grade parts (I believe), meanwhile uptano is likely using standard off the shelf parts, likely with bulk account discounts. Each of those servers could likely be put together for $500 - at $100/month, he should be making very good margins after a year or so. I have no idea on rent/electricity/etc, but with enough 1U servers the total cost per server may be only $10/month or so.

The big costs you pay for on AWS are the engineering, networking and UI development. Dedicated servers should be easier to provision and manage and he probably has a much smaller team.

So theoretically, it is possible that his prices are half as much as Amazon and he still makes a decent profit.

More like giant margins...

http://blog.carlmercier.com/2012/01/05/ec2-is-basically-one-...

Amazon reserved instances cost 2 to 10 times the price of renting a private dedicated server at your random dedicated server hosting service.

Compare youself: https://www.ovh.com/us/dedicated-servers/

That service looks absolutely awesome. Just signed up and had a look - but I miss a major thing: API.

The system is built on an internal API. We just need to expose a version!

I've been looking for this for...ages...

Thank you...so much for posting this.

This still uses virtualization though, correct? So you don't get full dedicated performance?

We're using OpenVZ for this reason. It's very close to bare metal performance, with the advantages of virtualization.