I did state in the very first post that hourly billing is the only asset. Thats why its perfect for overflow. I can spin up a double extra large and use it for a few hours when I need it, and kill it afterwards. Thats it though.
I use r1soft for redundancy and the costs for that are nominal. That sort of handles any hardware issues for me. I can get back up and running in about 10 minutes from a catastrophic failure.
All the stuff you mention below really doesnt matter to me, and I cant imagine it matters that much to many people. All these tests you mention could easily be done off site, or mirrored to run locally.
Still not worth paying 3-4x for these random "abilitys"
For things that matter- Bandwidth, Processing Power, Ram- Dedicated servers have EC2 Beat, hands down. More power, Less cost.
I can get back up and running in about 10 minutes from a catastrophic failure.
How often have you tried it?
We have a decent sized EC2 architecture right now and EBS snapshotting + provisioning on demand means that we can get all of the benefits of multiply redundant hardware at a fraction of the cost.
- We never need to upgrade software in place. Software gets freshly installed on a new cluster that duplicates our existing cluster and gets a increasing portion of traffic. Failover is as simple as a proxy cutover. The freedom to do config changes or 3rd party software upgrades and be able to just swap instances in and out enables us to experiment often and safely with production changes.
- Slave gets corrupted or falls out of sync with the master? A machine suffers a degraded disk? Bad net interface? Don't fix, replace.
- We can spin up an entire test stack that precisely mirrors our prod stack to stress test with significant cash outlay. Since this cost is low, we can stress test often and test the effect of s/w and config changes on performance easily. Stress tests the H/W outlays associated with them are traditionally hugely expensive if you want to test exactly like you run.
- Significant database migrations can take place on a slave that is easily promoted, snapshotted and cloned without having to deal with any long term ping ponging between instances.
- Copies of databases can be instantly provisioned and destroyed for data analysis needs. If analysis needs peak at 5x in a week, no one has to wait. Run 5 copies and shut them all off when you're done.
These are just a few quick things that we do with regularity. And I'm sure there are lots more opportunities to exploit these capabilities than we are thinking of.
Also - in terms of cost - don't forget to compare against reserved instance pricing.