The options we’re looking at for Postgres hosting are Compose.io and AWS RDS. Anyone have experience with either and how they compare?
Any other options to look at?
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From compose.io:
You can start with 1GB for $17.50/mo and, as your data grows, so does your database for only $12.00 for each additional GB. Your RAM, CPU, and I/O performance increase as your data scales.
Is this for real? 20gb worth of DB would cost you $245.50, and gets you 2gb of ram. AWS at that price is $51.84 /mo for an instance with equivalent ram, and (20*0.1) = 2 dollars a month for the 20gb for a grand total of $53.84.
Compose.io’s slider doesn’t even go above 100gb.
I can’t speak for compose.io, but RDS has been easy to use for us. Daily backups, multi availability zone etc.
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Cool. Thanks. I wish AWS pricing was as easy as that to understand though!
Looks like we’ll go with RDS. I thought Compose may have been cheaper 
How is the RDS dashboard for monitoring?
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I’ve always just hosted my own Postgres, a simple VM if not heavy is still cheaper than any of the above, and for a *BIG* server bare metal will be even more *substantially* cheaper. Just be sure to take backups, even AWS and such are not 'backups. 
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even AWS and such are not 'backups.
can you elaborate on this?
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RDS is great. Amazons Aurora is better. Start with RDS and as soon as you are big enough to justify Aurora, switch.
I switched a 100gb MySQL RDS instance to Aurora last year and it’s been amazing. Zero issues, faster performance, costs cut in half, no need for multiaz for failover sake because the data is already redundant, cache is stored separately and the restart time in the event of a crash is supposed to be < 1 minute. Also automatically grows up to 64TB with no intervention.
Cut costs, improved speed and removed my DBA time. When I heard they were adding Aurora for PG I thought that people were messing with me.
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I use Compose. I chose it because I wanted something simple to use and takes care of all the devops-related stuff that comes along with managing a database. The price is alright for smaller datasets but you’re better off looking at alternatives if you need more data.
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What sort of price is aurora?
And what additional features does compose give you to help out with the db?
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To be honest all hosted offerings are a bit of a joke, RDS 30,000 IOPS for some ungodly amount of money that’s 1/2 of the performance of single low end SSD drive and 1/20 the performance of a decent PCI-E SSD.
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This.
I ran a very well used postgresql database on my own hardware for pittence, where on Amazon it would have cost me many $thousands a month, their prices are crazy.
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Sure, but at the same time it’s cheaper than a dedicated dev ops person, and you can’t screw it up as badly.
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Amazon’s pricing is structured to discourage IOPs and encourage RAM fwiw
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It’s hard to discourage IOPS for an ACID DB as for an average setup you will do fsync for each transaction.
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It’s mostly for read sake. Lack of ram on read heavy loads, queries that result in huge temp tables, etc.
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New serious player in the game: https://www.online.net/en/ods
online.com (Free SAS/ Illiad) well known by french people, not tested yet, but the pricing is very clear and their products are often very nice.
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