It's dishonest because they adjusted their price to be under the self-hosting price, then cautioned that these studies should be done apples to apples. As if they'd just corrected it. What they neglected to do was point out that the self-hosting analysis focused on buying hardware instead of leasing as you do with AWS.
Here's why it sucks:
131 x amazon extra large: $56k after Amazon fixed the pricing
- 524 amazon cores
- tons of crap io
- 2tb of ram
131 x bought servers: $61k
- this includes colo and bandwidth and amortized cost of buying
- excludes labor which Amazon makes mention of
131 x $289 leased servers [1]: $37k
- 524 real cores, each with hyperthreading
- tons of dedicated disk io (raid 1 SSD and raid 1 SATA!!)
- 2tb of ram
- server breaks someone fixes it
These dedicated servers are obviously going to shit all over EC2 virtual servers if you're doing anything that involves disk or cpu so you could in all likeliness shave another $10k - $15k off the hosting bill to match the AWS capacity.
