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Amazon now renting physical servers you can cuddle and love

Long term discount deals coming to make AWS different from hosting how exactly?

This is different from hosting how exactly? Amazon Web Services has flicked the switch on “EC2 Dedicated Hosts” - a new cloud service that offers “physical servers fully dedicated for your use.”

The new service applies to over 30 variations of the instance types in the M4, C3, C4, G2, R3, D2, and I2 instance types and can run RHEL, Suse, Amazon Linux, Ubuntu or Windows Server. The servers only run in AWS's US East zone for now.

Servers currently rent by the hour, but AWS is promising it will soon offer “reservations” that will “... provide up to a 70% discount compared to the On-Demand price.”

A general purpose M4 instance on a dedicated host costs US$3.049 an hour in on-demand mode. The base configuration for an M4 instances packs a 2.4 GHz Intel Xeon E5-2676 v3, a pair of vCPUs and 8GB of RAM. At that price, you'd pay $26,079 a year for a dedicated instance, almost certainly well above the price of acquiring server plus a year's feeding and tending in your own bit barn. “Reservations'” deep discounting therefore seems eminently sensible, if not necessary to make Dedicated Hosts viable.

AWS thinks the market for Dedicated Hosts will appeal to bring-your-own-licence types, because they offer “visibility into the number of sockets and physical cores that are available so that you can obtain and use software licenses that are a good match for the actual hardware.” The compliance-conscious are another target, as AWS believes there are some users who need to be able to show the relevant authorities the box on which their data dances. Details of the new offering are yours for the reading here. ®

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