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recommendation for an on-demand high-power "cloud" provider with hourly (or less) billing?
I find myself from time to time needing a fast box to chew through some video encoding, but nowhere near enough to warrant getting a box for the full month. The use I intend would probably get me booted off a regular VPS provider anyway, for hogging the CPU.
I want something where I can just log in and choose say 16 cores, 8GB drive space (ideally SSD!) and 2GB ram, choose an OS and spin it up. SSH in, hammer out the encoding and then turn it off again an hour later, and pay for that hour's usage.
I love the power I have with Togglebox, but there's no way I could justify (or afford) to have it for the entire month. I'd probably use less than 12 hours a month.
EU would be ideal, but US is fine too.
Comments
What about one of the big Amazon EC2 instance?
I took a look at EC2 since I already use S3, but it seemed very expensive, unless I was missing something. Especially since you seem only to be able to pick from set instances. High-CPU instances are forced to have tons of disk space and tons of ram, neither of which I want. I'd be paying over the odds for something I wouldn't use.
eg:
High-CPU Extra Large Instance 7 GB of memory, 20 EC2 Compute Units (8 virtual cores with 2.5 EC2 Compute Units each), 1690 GB of local instance storage, 64-bit platform
7GB of ram is way too much, and 1.6TB of storage is crazy. Ideally I'd have 16 cores too, since that's the max ffmpeg can utilise. I guess if I don't find anything better, I could just go for one of these and use the silly amount of ram as a ram disk for encoding. Should keep it snappy. 1.6TB of drivespace sat doing nothing though... The miser in me doesn't like paying for that, especially at $0.76/hr. I could get a spot instance for half that price, I'm sure, but I'd still be paying for way more than I'd use.
What am I missing here? 12 hours at $0.76/hr is only $9.12, How much lower are you expecting?
There are a lot of cloud providers, but many of them have monthly minimums a lot higher than the $9.12 Amazon wants. Some are even as high as $100/month minimum.
Yeah I would just use the EC2 instance. $10 a month to do all your encoding is not bad. Just don't forget to turn off the instance when done
That would be a costly oops!
So basically you you want a node for yourself while you're using it, but you only want to pay for all CPU, some or RAM and a very small portion of disk space?
I want to pay for what I use. I wouldn't use the 1.6TB of drivespace EC2 would force me to take. It's wasteful, and it'd be a pain in the ass waiting for EC2 to provision 1.6TB of space for me.
12 hours for $9.12 isn't awful, but in the back of my mind I'd still be annoyed at wasting money on resources I don't need. It does look like EC2 is my best bet, to be honest. There will be lots of people who would use very little CPU but lots of drivespace, or lots of ram. It'd be nice if they could use what they need, and I could use what I need.
Hmm.. Even i'm looking for something similar with high CPU and low Disk and RAM, for mining LiteCoins :P an hour on these will give me enough for a month :P
Now I'm off to google to find out what litecoins are.
Like bitcoins but more underground? LOL
Looks like it. I really don't get these virtual currencies. What's to stop a million guys starting a million virtual currencies? Wouldn't that devalue them all? Not that they have any actual value at all, they're not backed by gold reserves or anything.
Nah, I just like mining for fun :P LiteCoins are like silver and BitCoins are like gold, is what people say for comparing them :P
@Gary : Success : http://www.icloudhosting.com/CloudServers/
and
http://www.softlayer.com/byoc/
(I think)
Amazon instances come up pretty quickly - i wouldnt call it wasteful
Ah, thanks SpeedBus. I'll definitely check out Softlayer's offering. icloudhosting.com don't seem to have prices anywhere on their site though. I submitted their form, but I'm sure now I'll get pestered by them every day like I'm getting from Elastichosts...
You need for encoding? rdp possible? you may found rdp with 64gb ram.from HD dvd to 400mb mkv within 15-20 minute.
one of my friend use them 4 month ago.
sborghost(dot)com/whmcs/cart.php
Dual Xeon RDP, 64GB RAM, 250-500GB HDD, 1GBiT
GOOD
another one at 50 usd
http://glanpol-net.eu
Gary,
From what you've said, you're looking at purely video transcoding?
Have you considered a service like http://www.ankoder.com/ ?
It might be much better suited than going alone.
It might be much better suited than going alone.
Seems rather expensive. It sounds like he wants to encode some large files (otherwise he could just do it on his own computer), and that would get expensive with that service.
@ raihan - not interested in a windows solution, not interested in only 4 cores and I'm not interested in a company who pretty blatantly court warez kiddies.
The second link of yours is $50/month, so that's way out of the desired price range.
I'm pretty sure ankoder.com won't give me nearly as much control over things as a command line and ffmpeg would, and like Kairus said, they want silly money.