A typical setup for a (small) web application is to have 2 tiers, one for the database and one for the application/web. Amazon EC2 offers a variety of different instances, starting form small to extra large high CPU instances. A high CPU medium instance costs double of a small instance. This raises the question, is it better (for performance) to have a cluster of 2 small instances or just one high CPU medium instance? The surprising results are presented in this post.

Disclaimer: The results are as they are. I didn’t validate them nor did I check their integrity. Please also consider that performance is just one criteria for hosting a web app.TimeWhale Time Tracking

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