Cloud Strategy and the Cloud Adoption Lifecycle
This month we published the 2016 Top Cloud IaaS Provider Pricing Comparison, a cloud pricing comparison of public cloud providers with data centers in North America. The report includes pricing for virtual machines (VMs) running Linux and Windows operating systems for hourly, monthly, annual, and 3-year contract terms.
Download the Report: 2016 Top Cloud IaaS Provider Pricing Comparison
Update – after the finalization of the 2016 report, Azure has since updated their pricing to include lower rates for the A-series instances than stated in this report.
Cloud Pricing Comparison Included Providers
The following 16 IaaS providers were included in the cloud pricing comparison:
| 1&1 | Cogeco Peer1 | IBM SoftLayer | Microsoft |
| Amazon | DigitalOcean | Internap | ProfitBricks |
| CenturyLink | Dimension Data | Interoute | Rackspace |
| CloudSigma | Joyent | VMware vCloud |
The Results
The cloud pricing comparison revealed major pricing differences between providers. For Linux VMs, the highest-priced providers were 7x more expensive than the lowest-priced. For Windows VMs, the highest-priced providers were 4.6x more expensive than the lowest. Considering such gaps in pricing, cloud buyers may want to assess their current providers and consider whether another vendor can provide the same level of service at a lower cost.
The following chart displays the pricing of Linux VMs per hour. This chart shows the increase in pricing according to the size of the virtual machine. Internap was the lowest-priced provider for all Linux VMs purchased by the hour, month, annually and 3-year durations, and was 3.8x less expensive than the price average.
The following chart displays the pricing of Windows VMs per hour. 1&1 was the lowest-priced provider for all Windows VMs purchased by the hour, month, and annually, and was 2.8x less expensive than the price average. CloudSigma was the most inexpensive of Windows VMs purchased under a 3-year commitment and was 2.9x less expensive than the average.
For more information on pricing, published discounts, and price differences between the listed public cloud providers, download the 2016 Top IaaS Providers Pricing Comparison.
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