Cloudorado Wins Second Prize in Startup Contest!

We are proud to announce Cloudorado has beaten over 700 other startups and won the second prize in “Business Concept” (Polish “Pomysł na Firmę”) contest by Raiffeisen Bank. Startup contests are a great opportunity for verification of a service. Winning the prize confirms the direction taken and becomes an important milestone. We believe it also proves the value we bring to our users.

The contest constituted of three parts. Firstly participants had to send their business plans, which were the input to select 12 finalists. The finals happened 1.5 month later in Warsaw, were participants had to present their idea in 10 minute pitch followed by 20 minutes of questions. A week later the winners were announced during an event in Warsaw.

We really hope it is not the last contest we win!

JoyentCloud now available in Cloudorado

Today we have added a new provider to Cloudorado – JoyentCloud. JoyentCloud is positioning itself as a high performance provider. Interesting feature to mention is vertical scaling without any down time.  From cost perspective noticeable aspect is 20TB transfer included per month per account and overage at the level of 8 cents per GB.

Check with the cloud computing price comparison engine if JoyentCloud offers best deal for your needs.

VPS.NET added to Cloudorado

Today we have added one more provider – VPS.NET. VPS.NET provides cloud servers in multiple locations in US (Chicago, Atlanta and Salt Lake City), Europe (London and Amsterdam) and Japan (Tokyo). They allow you to create servers that constitue of 1 to 45 blocks of 376MB RAM, 10GB storage and 600MHz dedicated CPU. Moreover each block comes with boundled 1TB tranfer. In addition to that you can extend server with 25GB SAN storage blocks or fast SSD storage in 2GB chunks.

Check VPS.NET offer with the cloud computing price comparison engine.

eApps added to Cloudorado

Today we have added a new cloud hosting provider to the Cloudorado – eApps. eApps is a hosting provider since 1996. Cloud server resources can be chosen in range of 256MB to 16GB RAM, 1 to 12 CPU cores and 8 to 500 GB storage. Servers are billed in monthly periods. The cloud servers are located in Atlanta data center.

Check with the cloud hosting price comparison service if eApps best serve your needs.

Amazon adds Windows support for Cluster instances

Today Amazon has added Windows support for their biggest instance types – Cluster Compute and Cluster GPU - see AWS Blog. These are the most powerful instances available in Amazon EC2, providing 8 Xeon Nehalem cores and 23 GB RAM, 10 Gigabit Ethernet and NVIDIA Tesla for the GPU instance. These instances weren’t so far available with Windows, what was limiting Amazon’s offer for CPU intensive applications running on Windows. Now the gap was closed. Obviously Cloudorado is already reflecting the change.  

GigeNET - a new cloud hosting provider in Cloudorado

Cloudorado has a new cloud hosting provider – GigeNET. GigeNET has two datacenters in US – Los Angeles and Chicago. Apart from cloud servers GigeNET provides also dedicated servers and collocation service making it  possible to build hybrid solutions. Cloud servers are charged on either hourly or monthly basis but the later includes free transfer. Internal traffic is free of charge including transfer to dedicated servers.

Check if GigeNET is the right provider for you with the cloud computing price comparison engine. 

DediServe – a new cloud hosting provider in Cloudorado

Today we have added a new provider to the Cloudorado – DediServe. DediServe is a provider with data centers in both US (Dallas) and Europe (London). Servers are billed on a monthly basis and also have transfer included (up to 4 TB). Incoming transfer is not billed and if the outgoing limit is exceeded, it is charged on a level of 3 cents per GB, which is the lowest price so far. This might be a good choice for transfer intensive applications. There are also many other items included in price - most notable backups, Windows Server Web Edition and support. 

Check with the cloud hosting price comparison service if DediServe is the best cloud provider for your needs.

Is Amazon the cheapest cloud computing provider? Cloud Computing Myth Busters!

When people think of cloud computing, they almost automatically think of Amazon EC2. Amazon has become the cloud computing company and is commonly perceived as the cheapest, if not the only, IaaS provider. But is this really so? Let’s play Myth Busters as on the Discovery Channel. Cloud Computing Myth Busters!

We will compare all of Amazon’s instances from Standard line with prices for cloud servers of at least the same parameters from other cloud computing providers. For this purpose we will use Cloudorado - the cloud computing price comparison engine. For Amazon to be considered the cheapest, it would have to be the cheapest for every instance type they provide, since these are their strongest points. If this is not met, there is no point in checking any further.

We will assume only cloud server costs. No transfer, licenses or load balancers. We will choose a full month of computing with on-demand prices. We could expand it to other instance types and other combinations, but there's no need to drag this article out with too many variations when you could easily try them on your own with the cloud hosting price comparison engine.

We will also provide one extension to Cloudorado calculations. As Amazon does not have persistent instance storage as other providers, we will also provide additional calculation of instances with a persistent EBS storage of equal size to instance storage. Unfortunately the cost of the EBS service depends on both size and number of I/O requests. As an estimate of I/O requests cost, we will use 100 I/O per second, resulting in $26 per month as indicated by Amazon in Projecting Costs section of EBS description. 

OK, with all assumptions explained, let’s start!

Cloud hosting pricing models explained

When choosing a cloud hosting provider, it is important to understand its pricing model. Unfortunately, this is not always easy to do, especially for those who start with cloud computing subject. That is why we wrote this article, which summarizes different approaches for pricing cloud servers that we have met with while creating Cloudorado – cloud computing price comparison. We hope this makes it easier for you to follow pricelists and helps you avoid any unpleasant surprises when it comes time to pay for cloud hosting.

Before we start, let’s limit scope of the article. We are going to talk only about Infrastructure as a Service providers (IaaS) and we will discuss only to the server part, and not go much into additional storage, load balancing, etc. Platform and Software as a Service (PaaS and SaaS) is completely out of the scope here.

Cloud server – the basic entity you pay for

First of all, you need to understand how resources are divided into cloud servers. The most common model is a predefined set of server types with a bundled amount of RAM, storage, and CPU. You can find this type in Amazon, Rackspace, GoGrid, and many other providers. 

How to reduce costs of on demand instances with spot instances

For those who want to reduce costs of on demand instance prices, there is an interesting tip how to do it with spot instances. In general spot instances are sold in form of an auction when there is unused capacity available at cloud provider. Well actually I think only Amazon has it in this form. In longer term it turns out that spot instance costs are somehow at a level of reserved instances, but you don’t need to pay reservation fee upfront. If you want to ensure your instance is not terminated just overbid, give even much higher price than normal on demand price – this is just a maximum you are willing to pay, but the final price will come when clearing price is set, which will be usually much lower. Obviously I wouldn’t recommend this method for mission critical servers.

You can find out more on this subject here:

• Don’t forget Spot Instances on AWS
• On delivering highly available services using spot instances

Would you like to see such pricing model implemented in Cloudorado - cloud computing price comparison engine?

Filtering results with data center location

We have just added a new functionality - filtering with location of the cloud data center. Location is very important factor when choosing a cloud hosting provider, since network application performance, page load times in particular, strongly depends on latency which is proportional to distance. Therefore try to choose cloud providers which have data centers close to your users.

To filter results by location use tabs just above the result table. Currently tabs are for continents only, which should be enough in far the most cases. For providers that have price lists dependent on data center location (eg. Amazon EC2), the price will update to prices in the selected region. If there are multiple data centers with different price lists in the selected region, the cheapest one in this region will be used.

We hope it will make the process of provider comparison even more accurate and result in finding really the best cloud hosting provider for your needs.

Three new cloud hosting providers available in Cloudorado

Today we have added 3 new cloud server hosting providers: Storm on Demand, ElasticHosts and Atlantic.Net.

Storm on Demand should be welcome by the most demanding customers. They have unique offer called Bare Metal Servers where a cloud server fully occupy a physical machine without sharing with any other cloud server. Such servers are still automatically provisioned and charged on hourly basis. Storm on Demand also provides probably the biggest cloud servers in the market – up to 32 cores and 96 GB RAM.

ElasticHosts is UK based IaaS provider that has datacenters in both United States and United Kingdom. This offer should be interesting for those who need to provide services in both North America and Europe.

Atlantic.Net has 18 years of experience in hosting solutions. Therefore they provide full portfolio of hosting capabilities. Starting from collocation, though dedicated servers and finishing on public and private clouds. This provides more capabilities for those who need more than just cloud servers.

Check prices for your cloud server needs at the new cloud providers with Cloudorado.

Amazon EC2 and Windows Azure switch to free incoming transfer

Today both Amazon and Microsoft have updated pricelists of their cloud solutions. Started by Microsoft Windows Azure and followed by Amazon AWS incoming transfer will be now free. Apart from that Amazon also reduced incoming transfer fees by 20% and more. It is a noticeable event because Amazon did not change price lists for a long time.

Free incoming traffic is not uncommon thing among cloud computing providers, but rather as a differentiator for Amazon’s competition.  We expect that the change done by the big players will cause updates in pricing for other vendors as well, making it an industry standard.

The change will be most notable for applications which mostly require incoming transfer, like crawling or backups.

Check with Cloudorado how the change will affect price for your cloud server needs. Cloudorado is obviously already using the latest prices.

Cloudorado Blog Is Starting

We are proud to announce start of a blog for the Cloudorado - cloud computing price comparison engine. In this blog we intend to include not only information about changes in the service but also articles about cloud computing, especially the economical side of it.

Cloudorado is a price comparison service for cloud hosting providers. It could be also referred as a price calculator for multiple providers, since the comparison is performed by calculating price for individually set server needs.

Manual comparison of cloud hosting offers is extremely tedious and requires analysis of different pricing models used by cloud vendors. But limiting yourself to just few of them may cost you a lot – difference between cheapest and the most expensive can easily exceed 10x! With Cloudorado you can effortlessly find the right offer for you and improve profits from your service by minimizing of cloud hosting costs.