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Jason
Jason

Reputation: 41

Thoughts on GoGrid vs EC2

I am currently hosting my SaaS application at GoGrid (Microsoft stack). Here's what I have:

I am paying around $900 / month for this. My web / app servers are busting at the seams and need to be upgraded to 4 GB of RAM. I also need a firewall, and GoGrid just added this service for an additional $200. After the upgrade, I will be paying around $1,400.

I started looking at Amazon EC2, specifically this config:

If I go with 1 year reserved instances, my upfront cost would be $4,500 and my monthly would be $700. This comes to $1,075 / month when amortized. Amazon also includes a firewall for free.

Here are my questions:

  1. Do any of you have experience running a database (especially SQL Server) on an EC2 instance? How did it perform compared to a dedicated machine? One of my major concerns is with disk I/O.

  2. Amazon's description of a compute unit is fairly vague. Any ideas on how the CPU performance on the database servers would compare?

I am hoping that the Amazon solution will provide significantly better performance than my current or even improved GoGrid setup. Having a virtual database server would also be nice in terms of availability. Right now I would be in serious trouble if I had any hardware issues.

Thanks for any insight...

Upvotes: 2

Views: 799

Answers (1)

brendan
brendan

Reputation: 29996

I've used Amazon for SQL Server hosting and it is great. We did not move from a dedicated machine to EC2 so I can't offer a comparison there but we have never had performance issues operating a relatively high volume - couple of hundred thousand transactions a day.

You can use an attached EBS volume for your data files to improve IO performance. My company used GoGrid before I arrived and had some bad experiences. I can't speak to how they perform today. All I can say is we are very happy with Amazon performance and reliability.

Upvotes: 2

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