I was looking for a small virtual machine (or VPS virtual private server) for development. Normally I would go with either digitalocean or linode. Their prices are the same: $10 per month for 2GB vm and $20 for 4GB. Because I know I will be using this VM for more than a year, I started look into the VM’s that offered by big 3 cloud providers with long term discount.
Below are the findings.
Amazon EC2
| type | cpu/ram | term | price |
|---|---|---|---|
| t3a.micro | 2cpu 1GB | standard 3-year all-upfront | $93 ($2.58/Mon) |
| t3a.small | 2cpu 2GB | standard 3-year all-upfront | $186 ($5.16/Mon) |
| t3a.medium | 2cpu 4GB | standard 3-year all-upfront | $372 ($10.33/Mon) |
Note price is for us-east-1 region. Different regions has different price, for example, for northern-California region (us-west-1) t3a.medium costs $509 for 3-year all-upfront, for Tokyo region (ap-northeast-1), t3a.medium costs $553 for 3-year all-upfront. us-east-2, us-west-2 have the same price as us-east-1.
Also note t3a use AMD cpu’s, t2 and t3 use Intel cpu’s and are more expensive. But in real world application it shouldn’t make much a difference.
Azure VM
| type | cpu/ram | term | price |
|---|---|---|---|
| B1S | 1cpu 1GB | 3-year | $3.50/Mon |
| B1MS | 1cpu 2GB | 3-year | $7.69/Mon |
| B2S | 2cpu 4GB | 3-year | $13.77/Mon |
GCP Compute Engine VM Committed use
| type | cpu/ram | term | price |
|---|---|---|---|
| N1 | 1cpu 2GB | 3-year | $15.82/Mon |
| N1 | 1cpu 4GB | 3-year | $19.16/Mon |
Looks like AWS has best price if you just want a 2-4GB VM without considering other factors.