Does someone have experience hosting a dedicated server on EC2 24/7? How's the performance and is it cost effective? Or is it preferable to host on digital ocean/linode?
At my current employer, we run about 10k+ EC2 instances 24/7.
DO / Linode will mostly be cheaper and proooobably offer a better price/performance ratio. You will however get a lot less options (especially GPU wise)
If you want to get a lot of power, especially for gaming, you can forget DO.
Let’s take your average (okay, this is really beefy, but I couldn't find something lower at most dedicated hosters) gaming system: 8 Cores (16 Threads), 32GB RAM, 2TB HDD.
At Digital Ocean, you pay approx. 320$/month for 12 Cores, 32GB RAM, and 320GB SSD
Let’s take your average small hoster, in this case Hetzner, as comparison:
You pay 55$/month (plus 55$ setup) for 8 cores (16 Threads), 32GB RAM and 2TB HDD.
I’m just showing this as example: Using Cloud hosters for stuff that is running 24/7 is not cost effective, especially if you always need the same performance – use a dedicated server instead, hosters that specialize on that can provide far better offers.
I agree on using dedicated hosting. However, average gaming systems are that powerful. I was digging for an above-average rig for a friend to play the latest games. The system I built him (Jackel) was 6 cores with 8GB of RAM and runs most of them very well. Only cost $700 with the Win7 license.
At those prices, it would be a better deal than hosting after around a year given it would continue working and have resale value.
Yeah, I got quite annoyed when trying to run a gaming server on DO, even their 160$/month tier is worse for that than a dedicated server for 20$ a month from a competitor.
