Indeed, NS and SL look like similar offers (maybe not apples to oranges, but perhaps tangerines to oranges).
Here's a SL offer similar to the NS Medium offer:
SL Bare Metal:
8 x 2.0 GHz Core Bare Metal Instance
8 GB RAM
1000 Mbps Public & Private Networks uplink
2000 GB Bandwidth (outbound; inbound is unmetered)
250GB SATA II
$319/mo.
NS Medium:
2 x Xeon 3.2Ghz
2GB RAM
(not sure of uplink; I don't need more than 10Mbps)
2 x 73GB SCSI Raid 1
$0.17/hr or $122.40/mo
+ $28.80/mo. for 8GB RAM
$151.20/mo.
NS is much cheaper.
NS has less HDD space than SL (73GB vs 250GB).
NS has fewer cores than SL (2 vs 8).
NS has a free shared HLB when you get >= 2 servers (not sure about SL).
The SL offer is more quickly deployed; since NS' offer requires an add-on, it would take more time to deploy.
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Perhaps comparing the above SL offer to a NS Jumbo (below) makes more sense.
NS Jumbo
2 x E5405 Quad Core 2Ghz
8GB RAM
(not sure of uplink; I don't need more than 10Mbps)
2 x 500GB SATA RAID 1
$0.38/hr or $273.60/mo
This supposedly can be deployed without a day or more delay.
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What are your thoughts on SL in general? They are certainly more well known. I'm not sure how much that should factor into one's decision.
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I wonder if anyone cares to comment on the "Bare Metal Cloud" vs the "Public Cloud" offers by SL.
The chief difference seems to be storage options. The "Public Cloud" uses SAN while the "Bare Metal Cloud" has its own local HDD. I'm no expert on SAN vs HDD. Has anyone found any benchmarks (IOPS, latency) for these two SL offer types?
Heh, I guess the point of these instant provisioning things is to you know, get one of each for an hour and try it myself! Newman!
