Yes, it’s time to go virtual. But lets be realistic.

David Berlind’s video Is it time to throw away your servers? is a nice high level explanation of Amazon EC2, and he begins to make the case in business terms for moving to virtual servers. Unfortunately his cost comparison is not apples to apples – he fails to atleast touch on the extra costs involved. Particularly EC2 bandwidth, which was completely left out on the EC2 side, and was no doubt included in the $350/month per physical box number.

Not to mention the time/money for atleast one linux guru to setup your EC2 servers, secure them, back them up, SLAs, etc. I’d like to see a more in depth whiteboard video that goes into these issues. I think EC2 is great, but the cost differences aren’t quite as dramatic as Berlind’s video would have you believe, unless no one ever visits your site. Lets see a more honest comparison. I think EC2 would still come out ahead.

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