Amazon EC2 offers Reserved Instances
What’s a reserved instance? According to this post in the Amazon Web Services blog:
…we’ve created a new EC2 pricing model, which we call Reserved Instances. After you purchase such an instance for a one-time fee, you have the option to launch an EC2 instance of a certain instance type, in a particular availability zone, for a period of either 1 of 3 years. Your launch is guaranteed to succeed; there’s no chance of encountering any transient limitations in EC2 capacity. You have no obligation to run the instances full time, so you’ll pay even less if you choose to turn them off when you are not using them.
Steady-state usage costs, when computed on an hourly basis over the term of the reservation, are significantly lower than those for the on-demand model.
So, what does this mean to the layperson? Well, it means that Amazon is going to guarantee that you will be able to run your reserved instance when you need it. Great for disaster recovery (DR) situations. In addition, your hourly cost is much lower for a reserved instance than for the current pay-as-you-go model.
Reserved instances are available for US customers with Unix/Linux instances. I posted a question to the blog asking about availability for Windows instances. Received a reply from Jeff Barr stating that:
We do plan to offer Windows Reserved Instances. We still have a few things to work out before we are ready to start talking about this, however.
Good work, Amazon.
doesnt this replace a traditional dedicated server or vps? i see slichost getting screwed.
Yes, EC2 is intended to replace a traditional dedicated server, and now, with the new pricing, is much more competitive with VPSs. I’m sure that large hosting companies like SliceHost and HostGator will respond quickly to Amazon’s announcement. In fact, RackSpace has already announced cloud servers, starting Monday, March 16, that start at a price of $10.95/mo.