WebSockets cost us $1M on our AWS bill

Is this really an AWS issue? Sounds like you were just burning CPU cycles, which is not AWS related. WebSockets makes it sound like it was a data transfer or API gateway cost.

> Is this really an AWS issue?

I doubt they would have even noticed this outrageous cost if they were running on bare-metal Xeons or Ryzen colo'd servers. You can rent real 44-core Xeon servers for like, $250/month.

So yes, it's an AWS issue.

  You can rent real 44-core Xeon servers for like, $250/month.

Where, for instance ?

There are many colos that offer dedicated server rental/hosting. You can just google for colos in the region you're looking for. I found this one

https://www.colocrossing.com/server/dedicated-servers/

I don't know anything about Colo Crossing (are they a reseller?) but I would bet their $60 per month 4-core Intel Xeons would outperform a $1,000 per month "compute optimized" EC2 server.

For $1000 per month you can get a c8g.12xlarge (assuming you use some kind of savings plan).[0] That's 48 cores, 96 GB of RAM and 22.5+ Gbps networking. Of course you still need to pay for storage, egress etc., but you seem to be exaggerating a bit....they do offer a 44 core Broadwell/128 GB RAM option for $229 per month, so AWS is more like a 4x markup[1]....the C8g would likely be much faster at single threaded tasks though[2][3]

[0]https://instances.vantage.sh/aws/ec2/c8g.12xlarge?region=us-... [1]https://portal.colocrossing.com/register/order/service/480 [2]https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/8305329 [3]https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/intel-xeon-e5-2699-...

Wouldn't c8g.12xlarge with 500g storage (only EBS is possible), plus 1gbps from/to the internet is 5,700 USD per month, that's some discount you have.

If I try to match the actual machine. 16G ram. A rough estimate is that their Xeon E3-1240 would be ~2 AWS vCPU. So an r6g.large is the instance that would roughly match this one. Add 500G disk + 1 Gbps to/from the internet and ... monthly cost 3,700 USD.

Without any disk and without any data transfer (which would be unusable) it's still ~80USD. Maybe you could create a bootable image that calculates primes.

These are still not the same thing, I get it, but ... it's safe to say you cannot get anything remotely comparable on AWS. You can only get a different thing for way more money.

(made estimates on https://calculator.aws/ )

What do you mean by "1gbps from/to the internet"?

125 MB per second × 60 seconds per minute × 60 minutes per hour × 24 hours per day x 30 days = 324 TB?

If you want 1 Gbps unmetered colo pricing, AWS is not competitive. So set up your video streaming service elsewhere :-)

https://portal.colocrossing.com/register/order/service/480 offers unmetered for $2,500 additional per month, for the record.

If you have high bandwidth needs on AWS you can use AWS Lightsail, which has some discounted transfer rates.