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What are the pros and cons of using dedicated servers versus Aamzon EC2 for hosting a high traffic website - that has about 2 million visitors and 5 million page views a month. The content is mostly dynamic and served from a database. Does anyone has any experience of the costs and performance for such a setup.

hostingtech
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Amazon EC2 is going to be much more cost-effective versus dedicated servers from my experience. Should you experience a sudden rise in the volume of traffic to your site all you need to do is shell out some extra $$ to Amazon and voila your site can handle the traffic (assuming there are no coding bottlenecks). Unless you have a truly massive website (ie: Facebook) the benefits of hosting on Amazon EC2 far outweigh the risks.

One of the only risks that you take with hosting on EC2 was showcased a few months ago when the whole cloud went down, taking Foursquare, Quorra, Reddit, and other multi-million user base sites down along with it.

From a user experience I believe interaction with the cloud hosting provider is pretty much the same as interacting with a dedicated server, so the only real concern to take into account would be cost-effectiveness.

MoarCodePlz
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    By using the provided calculators at Amazon, it appears so far that the costs for comparable performance are higher with Amazon EC2 than with dedicated server(s). The benefit of EC2 appears to be more flexibility in deploying additional instances to handle extra traffic. If you have predictable traffic demands, then this benefit does not really matter as much. – hostingtech Jun 27 '11 at 20:41
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    I would challenge the statement that EC2 is one of the cheapest. If you compare cloud providers, EC2 often is not the cheapest option - check it on [Cloudorado](http://www.cloudorado.com/). Personally I find hybrid option very appealing - you use dedicated servers for constant load, while cloud servers for bursts. But not many has such option - one I know of is GoGrid and Rackspace. – okrasz Jun 27 '11 at 21:01
  • @okrasz Redacted / deleted. The only real comparison I can offer is cloud hosting vs dedicated hosting. I had no idea that EC2 was so expensive compared to those other providers. My apologies, and thank you for the site (Cloudorado). I will definitely be using this in the future. – MoarCodePlz Jun 27 '11 at 21:04
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    AWS is also far more expensive than unmanaged dedicated servers for similar performance when all costs are considered. – Seun Osewa Oct 27 '13 at 17:32
  • Also a simple search on their forum for "instance lost" or "instance vanished" may lead you to rethinking their quality of service. Generally I'm a really dissatisfied customer. Searching on the web, you can get the same "horsepower" from a dedicated Server for half or even 1/3 of the price. The only problem may be scaling, but most companies offer data migration to new servers for a few hundred $ – Ant Jan 27 '14 at 10:23
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My own experience tells me that at least in this part of the world, New Zealand, where we don't yet have a local amazon server farm, Amazon provides poor performance and is one of the most expensive options for hosting busy websites. I placed some background on my blog that goes through my own experiences. http://www.printnet.co.nz/category/hosting/

Kevin Trye
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