I would love if cloud providers offered SSD options for their full range of boxes.
For example, to be able to get a Linode at only a fraction more of the cost (say, a 10% premium) with the disk being SSD (and obviously reduced capacity compared to HDD).
I have seen the current offerings but found them to either be too costly (AWS, only one of the the largest instances), or too onerous (ssdnodes.com whose base products aren't aligned with the costs elsewhere, and to move all of your hosts to be near your SSD powered database is a big task when I only seek a little task).
I was even considering co-locating as the most cost-effective way to get SSDs when providers still massively overprice them. It all feels a bit like the RAM scam a decade ago when they'd charge you near the cost of the RAM every 2 months. Again though... co-location fell into the onerous class of actions.
Right now, pragmatically I stay with HDD and Linode.
But Linode should look at my $500 per month account and be well aware that as soon as I see a competitor offer SSD nodes at a cost-competitive point that offsets the burden to move... I'll be gone.
Since NAND flash is being price fixed, and likely will be for several more years to come (we're just now starting to see LCD prices drop to reasonable levels after years and years of price fixing, I expect it'll take a similar amount of time for the NAND fixing to get busted and the market to respond), I don't think a 10% premium will be at all possible for a very long time. NAND storage SHOULD be significantly cheaper than rotational storage since it is cheaper to produce, requires fewer exotic materials, has a far wider market, etc. And eventually it will be. But for now, there is a huge premium on NAND storage. I am sure Amazon, EMC, and the others have done the math and simply don't think there is a significant market of people willing to pay for such a service, at least not at the steep rates they would have to charge to meet their growth projections.
You're already on a cloud system, so you have to have a plan in place for your instance to up and disappear without warning. If your instance has an unplanned outage of any kind, you kill it and spawn a new one. You may as well use libeatmydata and reap the performance benefit.
I hosted at vps.net for a while and they were offering Fusion IO drives as an addon. I can't easily find information on their site about it anymore, but I know it was an option at one point.
(Their management change a couple years ago, made a bunch of changes that pissed me off, so I left and moved to Linode).
EDIT: vps.net charges $25/month for 1GB of storage on FusionIO drives, and they sell in 2GB increments. 2GB is $50/month. 36GB is $900/month
For example, to be able to get a Linode at only a fraction more of the cost (say, a 10% premium) with the disk being SSD (and obviously reduced capacity compared to HDD).
I have seen the current offerings but found them to either be too costly (AWS, only one of the the largest instances), or too onerous (ssdnodes.com whose base products aren't aligned with the costs elsewhere, and to move all of your hosts to be near your SSD powered database is a big task when I only seek a little task).
I was even considering co-locating as the most cost-effective way to get SSDs when providers still massively overprice them. It all feels a bit like the RAM scam a decade ago when they'd charge you near the cost of the RAM every 2 months. Again though... co-location fell into the onerous class of actions.
Right now, pragmatically I stay with HDD and Linode.
But Linode should look at my $500 per month account and be well aware that as soon as I see a competitor offer SSD nodes at a cost-competitive point that offsets the burden to move... I'll be gone.