The price for Hetzner's EX 4S is 49.58 EUR for non-EU customers and 59 EUR per month VAT-included for most EU customers (EU corporations registered for VAT purposes need to apply the VAT specific to their own country).

An Amazon m2.4xlarge instance (High-Memory Quadruple Extra Large Reserved Instance) with Heavy Utilization on a 3-year commitment costs $9'660 for the 3y term and 3 * 365 * 24 * $0.454 = $11'931 in usage fees, which means a $21'591 total, $7'197 per year or $600 per month (EUR 458 per month at the current exchange rate).

458 EUR versus 49-60 EUR is 9x more expensive at full-time usage. (instance type and price data extracted from http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/ and http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/ ).

If you were to consider just the Amazon Heavy Utilization term commitment for 3 years, that's still $9'660 / 3 / 12 = $268 (EUR 205) each month.

Apples / Oranges.

Quite apart from the ability to buy by the hour, the Hetzner offering really isn't suitable for processing any data you care about - it's not using ECC RAM, and the processor used doesn't support it.

TLDR; the €59/mo EX 4S scores higher (1729) than AWS m2.4xlarge (1511).

You might also want to check out some benchmarks I ran a few weeks ago. It compares many types of EC2 instances: http://blog.carlmercier.com/2012/01/05/ec2-is-basically-one-...

Related to http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3537513.

Why is this company getting so much attention as of late? I've never heard of them until recently, and considering how crowded the whole VPS/dedicated server market is, what makes them stand out?

This server is does not come with ECC-memory. How "bad" would it be to run a database server on a non ecc server?

For those that are curious, the motherboard in these systems is a ASUSTeK P8H67-M PRO. Seems like it's a gaming board - understandable given it's an i7 platform.

Does anyone offer a similar product / price point in the US? I haven't found anything remotely close. Why not?