Top cloud IaaS providers compared

Grazed from TechRepublic. Author: Thoran Rodrigues.

It has been about a year since I last updated the comparison of cloud infrastructure-as-a-service providers. Over the course of this last year, we’ve seen even more changes to the market, from the pricing and plans to the market players to the services being offered. Some companies, such as Softlayer, have been acquired by others (IBM, in Softlayer’s case), and yet more new entrants have appeared.

To account for these changes, and for other situations, I’ve made some changes to the comparison. First, IBM was dropped from the list, since the pricing information for its public cloud offering is no longer available online (they’ve shifted the focus onto Softlayer). Hosting.com also had to be dropped from the list since their pricing data is no longer online for anyone to access either…

The base instance for calculating the monthly price has also changed. This time around, I’ve used AWS’s small instance (1.7GB RAM, 1 CPU) as a baseline to select instance types. The reason for this is that most providers not only compare themselves directly with Amazon, but also have started offering similar instance types. Another change is that I’ve opted to use the price values for servers running Windows. The reason for this is that the price is much more standardized for Windows instances than others, delivering better comparison results…

Read more from the source @ http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/the-enterprise-cloud/top-cloud-iaas-providers-compared/