• EC2 pay as your go service, while cheap for low CPU/bandwidth usage, can get very costly compared to our fixed plans. With HostCube there are no surprises at the end of the month. Most of today’s Internet applications are CPU bound and EC2 can get very costly in this regard.
• No hardware based load balancer, important for scaling or automatic fail over.
• No persistent storage unless you use their S3 service. Shutdown or the node dies; your data and configuration settings are gone. Using S3 service your disk I/O traffic then becomes network bound and of course is an additional fee.
• When compared to our managed VPSes, you must perform all of the system administration yourself. This IMHO is the biggest added value when comparing services. Our service already includes backups, monitoring, administration, patch management, security, and a control panel that makes many administration tasks a simple click. With EC2 you must be much more involved with the system administration.
• Technical support with EC2 is an additional option. What’s not clear is how much support you really get. Can they assist and give recommendations on how to scale your site?
• Odd instance sizes (1.7 GB of memory, 350GB of storage?) what is that? Computing is based upon the multiples of 2.
• 32-bit by default. We, by default, use 64-bit which is 10-15% faster than the 32 bit version.  It appears you have to use the their Extra Large instance to get 64-bit.  This really becomes noticeable when you use more than 2GB of ram.  Not sure with Amazon but all of our nodes are using 64 bit based Xen.  The hypervisor is really where the performance matters.

In brief, EC2 is really geared towards batch based processing and processing services in low volume. If you need public service access (i.e. web service) and hassle-free administration HostCube is a perfect fit and a much better value.

While the HostCube service has some shortcomings, we are adding services like shared storage, quick (under 15 min.) provisioning and an API in the near future.

• We can quickly upgrade a VPS (memory, CPU and disk space) the next level plan. Downtime is usually only a few minutes.
• Hardware is virtualized. Upgrading to more powerful hardware is transparent to the VPS.
• Redundant hardware. Power supply, CPU, memory, and hard drives all have spares. Should a component fail in most cases it will not affect a VPS.
• Hardware RAID 10. Many more hard drive spindles are available to store data, which improves disk IO performance.
• Pay as you go/grow. You only pay for the resources you need. You can upgrade/downgrade at any time.
• Less power consumption. For the customers who are concerned about the environment and being “green”. VPSes use less power when compared to dedicated servers.
• Higher server density per rack unit. The amount of VPSes you can fit in 2 rack units (otherwise known as 2U) would normally take 16 – 20Us. Since we pay per rack unit, this allows us to offer VPSes plans at a cheaper rate.

The limitations of a dedicated server are:

• Adding additional hardware/resources can lead to long periods of downtime
• Operating system configuration is tied directly to hardware. This makes it harder to swap different hardware, especially with the Microsoft Windows operating system.
• Must configure hardware to plan for future growth or peak usage periods. This means more money and resources wasted
• In many cases other vendors use software based RAID. Your CPU must do the RAID processing, which leads to more overhead.
• Most dedicated servers do not have redundant hardware.

Our VPS Plans are designed be better than dedicated servers in every way but at a fraction of the cost. Keep in mind, not all providers use quality high-end hardware like we do. Unfortunately a VPS can be placed on any type of hardware and in some cases other providers use the same low end servers as VPS nodes. All of our VPS node hardware is designed for five 9′s uptime (99.999%) and achieve this with ease.

VPS technology has improved dramatically over the past few years. We believe they are going to replace most situations where a dedicated servers were once needed. This isn’t to say VPSes should replace all servers. There are complex hosting situations when you should stay with a dedicated server:

• High disk IO (i.e. SQL server)
• CPU bound processes (i.e. application layer server)

While VPSes can be used in low volume situations, the virtualization overhead doesn’t make these situations the most efficient use of the hardware. We’ve designed our VPS plans specifically to make it apparent when a dedicated server is needed. Once you outgrow any of our VPS plans, in most cases it’s time to move your site to either a dedicated server or multiple VPS configuration.