Time to throw away your servers?

I'm David Berlind with ZDNet and today I'm going to answer the question of whether or not it's time to throw away your servers. What I mean by that is your physical servers.

Now maybe you're one of those people who figured out that it's a good time to outsource the physical servers that you once had in your data center to some hosting company that does it for you in their data center. Of course the benefits of this are if you're going to run your servers and one of them goes down or two of them go down, or you have a natural disaster, usually when you outsource it to a hosting company, they make sure that these things are constantly running.

They manage them for you in a way that your servers are always reliable. But at the end of the day, you are still running physical servers.

Now the question is whether you should take it to a whole other level when it comes to outsourcing your servers and going to something called the Elastic Computing Cloud, otherwise known as EC2 from Amazon. Now what's cool about the EC2 or Elastic Computing Cloud is that these servers are actually virtualized in this cloud. There are no real physical machines, they're spread out across a data center that Amazon runs of multiple machines, but they're all virtualized in a way that through a series of APIs that a programmer can access, it can launch and it can also take down these machines at will.

Now why would this be of use to anybody, to be able to launch machines and take them down at any time? Well, for starters, if you need three systems during Christmas but you only need two on the other parts of the year, you can run three systems during Christmas and through the API turn off one of them, and you don't have to pay for it. Part of the real advantage of EC2 is that you only pay for what you take.

In addition to the benefit of being able to launch and bring down computers at whim and also pay as you go, there's another big advantage to the cost of Amazon's EC2 service.

First, let's look at what it costs to normally run through a typical hosting business, and I'll use my events company as an example. Today we pay for servers, we have two servers, and it costs us $350 a month with our server hosting company. So if we look at 350 times 12, that gets us to $4,200 per year per server. We have two servers, we multiply that times two, and that gets us to $8,400 per year for server hosting. Now that's a lot of money but it's also peace of mind. After all, I don't have to worry about keeping those servers up and running, that's somebody else's headache and we're willing to pay good money for that.

Now let's see what it would cost me if I decided to wipe out the computers that I was using in my data center hosting company and used one of the EC2 virtual machines on Amazon's Cloud. We'll go over here and do some interesting Math and you'll see that there are some really key cost benefits to going that route.

So let's say we take 365 days a year times 24 hours a day: that gives us 8,760 hours per year of hosting. Now Amazon charges 10 cents per hour for a machine that's the equivalent of a 1.7Ghz X86 box with 1.75Gb RAM and 160Gb of local disk space, for a total of 8,760 hours per year, if we multiply that times 10 that gets us to $876 per year to run one server.

You toss in the number two, because we're running two servers, and that gets us to $1,752 per year to run two servers for the entire year, and you put that up against $8,400 and now just for a small business like mine, we're talking about major savings. That's a huge difference.

What if you're running 50 or 100 servers, and what if you're bringing them up and bringing them down as you need them? Then you really can see some incredible benefits.

All of this, though, is required through Amazon's API web services that developers normally access, so it's not exactly the same as going to a hosting company: there are some challenges in making it run in this fashion. But nevertheless, the revolution is underway. I think it's soon going to be time for you to throw away your servers and move into the virtual world like Amazon's EC2.

For ZDNet, I'm David Berlind.