h1.2xlarge

Analysis

The h1.2xlarge is a storage optimized instance in the h1 series with 8 vCPUs and 32 GiB of memory on Intel Xeon E5-2686 v4 (Broadwell) (up to 2.3 GHz), which makes it balanced at 4 GiB of memory per vCPU.

Running it in N. Virginia instead of Ireland saves $37.23 a month per instance: $0.4680/hour against $0.5190/hour, a 11% spread. It is not offered in Canada Central, São Paulo, London, Frankfurt, Mumbai, Singapore, Sydney and Tokyo, so plan around that if you need a presence there.

At $0.4680/hour on demand in US East (N. Virginia), about $342 a month, the h1.2xlarge is one of the cheaper ways to buy storage optimized capacity: only 2% of the 90 current storage optimized types cost less per vCPU-hour than its $0.0585.

It has local instance storage (1 x 2000 GB HDD), which is fast but lost when the instance stops. Network: Up to 10 Gigabit.

Looking beyond its own line, 23 of 42 current types with 8 vCPUs and similar memory are cheaper. The cheapest of those is the t4g.2xlarge on AWS Graviton2 at $0.2688/hour. It is burstable, so it only suits workloads that do not run the CPU flat out.

Reserving it for a year with no upfront payment cuts the Linux rate to $0.3180/hour, which beats on demand once it runs more than 68% of the time; three years brings it to $0.2260/hour, 52% below on demand. Windows Server roughly adds 79% to the bill at $0.8360/hour, because the licence is charged per vCPU.