h1.4xlarge

Analysis

The h1.4xlarge is a storage optimized instance in the h1 series with 16 vCPUs and 64 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 $74.46 a month per instance: $0.9360/hour against $1.04/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 $0.9360/hour on demand in US East (N. Virginia), about $683 a month, the h1.4xlarge 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 (2 x 2000 GB HDD), which is fast but lost when the instance stops. Network: Up to 10 Gigabit.

Looking beyond its own line, 19 of 37 current types with 16 vCPUs and similar memory are cheaper. The cheapest of those is the m6g.4xlarge on AWS Graviton2 at $0.6160/hour.

Reserving it for a year with no upfront payment cuts the Linux rate to $0.6360/hour, which beats on demand once it runs more than 68% of the time; three years brings it to $0.4520/hour, 52% below on demand. Windows Server roughly adds 79% to the bill at $1.67/hour, because the licence is charged per vCPU.