So, there's this service out there called ElasticLive, run by enomaly. At first, it looked like competition to Amazon EC2, but then I saw how they were wording their services and it didn't take long to realize that they are reselling Amazon EC2 services.  Amazon EC2 is already rather easy to use, so I am curious as to what they offer over Amazon EC2.

For starters, for their dedicated grid machine they charge 25 cents per hour, 45 cents per gigabyte of bandwidth, and 25 cents per gigabyte a month for storage. However, they include 1000 GB of bandwidth and 160GB of storage in this pricing. Let's compare, shall we?

• Amazon EC2 native: $297.04
• ElasticLive: $182.62 

For someone maximizing the account, ElasticLive will be losing about $115 a month. Even with 160GB of storage, bandwidth only has to average below about 425GB, though, and they make money.  Then, again, above about 1250GB of bandwidth they'll start making money again. So, for the consumer, it's only cheaper if you're in that middle-ground. 

However, they offer fractional virtual servers (likely a VM system within a VM).  For 5 cents an hour, you get a system with 20GB storage, 200MB RAM, and 60GB of bandwidth for the month.  Given the normal system has 1.75GB of RAM and 160GB of space, this gives about 8 virtual machines per, uh, virtual machine.  Let's compare this, shall we?

• A full Amazon EC2 native AMI with same transfer and storage: $88.04
• 1 ElasticLive fractional: $36.52
• 8 ElasticLive fractional: $292.19
• Amazon EC2 with 8x transfer and 8x storage: $193.04

Here, we can see the consumer that just needs something small and simple can save some money, especially if they don't need much space or bandwidth.  They can get many of the Amazon EC2 advantages but at a lower cost because ElasticLive is helping divide the resources out.  Assuming they can get 8 instances on one AMI, they'd be making money with only 5 or 6 fully used fractional grid machines.

It would also seem that ElasticLive offers some basic AMIs that can be used as part of their service, including access to server configuration tools like cPanel and Plesk. It's an interesting idea, for sure.  However, it seems to have a fairly narrow window of use to the consumer, unless their provisioning tools are very easy to use compared to something like the EC2 UI plugin for Firefox. Although it's a common thing to do, I'm not sure about the prospects of building a business off of the fact the most consumers don't fully use what they pay for.  I'd also be curious if someone could access their personal AMIs in their own AWS account for the fractional stuff or not. 

One service that they do offer that is interesting is the ElasticDNS service for dynamic DNS for Amazon EC2 users.  I'll have to check that out a bit more...

Posted by Shane on March 8, 2007 9:21 PM | Permalink