pure EC2 is a terrible choice for general web application hosting
"Terrible" is seriously overstating it. There are a lot of advantages to AWS (I understand you said "pure", but that really makes no sense in the context of AWS) that can justify the price premium -- ELB, elastic IPs, the ability to spit out AMI images (and machines from them) at will, the private networks, the firewall, etc. The fantastic network capacity (I am always wary of services like OVH that offer "unlimited" anything, because it is always limited, and unlimited means that your peers will be saturating switches because it's "free").
There are a tremendous number of flexibility reasons why EC2 comes at a premium, and it is an easy justification in many shops. Even if you aren't using ELB today, and won't have to spin out machines, etc, that flexibility has significant value.
I say this having machines at AWS, Digital Ocean and OVH. OVH is very, very bare bones, and you'd better have an escape hatch because the simplest configuration error can leave your machine incapacitated and beyond reach (adding the KVM option is usuriously expensive -- like $350 per month per machine).
> I am always wary of services like OVH that offer "unlimited" anything, because it is always limited, and unlimited means that your peers will be saturating switches because it's "free"
Comparing bandwidth between OVH and AWS is a little cheeky. Bandwidth on AWS costs an absolute fortune, not remotely economical for bulk transfer.
The switch saturation problem doesn't even necessarily go away if you instate X TB/month data caps. I would have thought local switches could handle it anyway, with cheap boxes typically only having 100Mb ports.
Some data centers don't even charge for internal traffic, which means you're still exposed when cheap VPSs and dedis are used as P2P file sharing nodes and are exchanging a lot of traffic within the building.
In any case, I'm just grateful the multi-terabyte range is so affordable, bulk transit costs in the data center has been falling year-on-year for a decade, and lots of hosts don't seem to have passed on the benefits.
Incidentally, OVH do have different SLAs across their server range. The low end stuff is "best effort", the more expensive options are supposed to be "guaranteed". They even tell you what switches they use.
> OVH is very, very bare bones, and you'd better have an escape hatch because the simplest configuration error can leave your machine incapacitated and beyond reach
Their network boot facilities are pretty handy. As long as you use a sensible filesystem you can always network boot their recovery option and access your files (and I think chroot in?). The lack of KVM is annoying though... especially when you're like me and compiling and running custom kernels (but you can network boot one of their kernels as well).
"Terrible" is seriously overstating it. There are a lot of advantages to AWS (I understand you said "pure", but that really makes no sense in the context of AWS) that can justify the price premium -- ELB, elastic IPs, the ability to spit out AMI images (and machines from them) at will, the private networks, the firewall, etc. The fantastic network capacity (I am always wary of services like OVH that offer "unlimited" anything, because it is always limited, and unlimited means that your peers will be saturating switches because it's "free").
There are a tremendous number of flexibility reasons why EC2 comes at a premium, and it is an easy justification in many shops. Even if you aren't using ELB today, and won't have to spin out machines, etc, that flexibility has significant value.
I say this having machines at AWS, Digital Ocean and OVH. OVH is very, very bare bones, and you'd better have an escape hatch because the simplest configuration error can leave your machine incapacitated and beyond reach (adding the KVM option is usuriously expensive -- like $350 per month per machine).