The plot thickens... to somewhere between treacle & caramel.You can actually
rent Amazon images cheaper than the "On Demand" rate. How much cheaper? Well, for the GPU instance, about a third of the price.
How so? Well, you can either rent the server a year or three at a time (that's $5630/year for the GPU instance, yielding ~13.40 blocks - 670 BTC. How's the ol' cognitive biases going?) -
OR - you can bid for instances. This is called "spot" instancing. Think of it as the Mt Gox of instance rental. They even have pretty graphs of the history of bids.
So, spot pricing... well, the GPU instance goes for about $0.76 per instance hour. That's a good 1/3 of the usual price. So lets shoot back to my original post and push these numbers around...
- $0.76 hour-1 x 8 instances = $145.92 day-1
- 1.64 Ghs-1 now= 1 block every ~3.4 days
- 1 block = 50 BTC @ USD$3.47 = $173.50 / 3.4 days = $51 day-1
You're still only making 34% of your money back (if you sell now). You're better off playing pokies. Seriously.
So still not good value. But it's much better. So unless you have spare cash
now and expect the value of a bitcoin to more than double before you want to cash out, buy an ATI/AMD 8XXX; and even then... But maybe that's what you want to do? Who am I to judge! I'm someone who just got their Amazon AWS Bill (~$100 if you're interested, for a good two days work!). I'm not begging; 'cos I think the information is easily worth that much - but if you somewhat agree,
donation link in the dooblydoo.
Oh, and I also charted up the costs/benefit of spot pricing across the Amazon range. Just to be sure GPU instances
were superior. BTW, sorry it's an image; couldn't find a nicer way to export Google Spreadsheets.
https://i.imgur.com/tYXZ6.pngYep; GPU FTW.