Updates to ec2instances.info

by Ben Schaechter


Vantage launches ec2instances.info

Over four years ago, Vantage acquired ec2instances.info: the popular open-source tool for evaluating Amazon EC2 server specifications and accompanying pricing. We actually acquired the site when the Company was only two people and before even raising any investment. We had an idea of how it could contribute as a channel for the company, but didn’t realize quite how big the site would get. Ec2instances.info was even shared in our Seed deck as part of our GTM strategy for the company, a very early decision, as you can see below.

EC2 Instances Slide 1
EC2 Instances Slide 2

Seed deck ec2instances.info slides

A lot has happened in 4 years since then, but the original codebase had largely stayed the same. We’ve consistently invested in the original, antiquated codebase and attempted to respond to features and functionality as part of our small-but-nimble marketing team’s roles and responsibilities. For long durations of time, Vantage employees were the only contributors to the property. Along the way, the site has grown tremendously from about 275,000 unique users to nearly 2,000,000.

The one thing that’s been consistent during that timeframe, though, is that that site was really poor from a developer experience perspective. The codebase was old, only lightly maintained, and it made contributing and, more importantly, delivering value to end-users really difficult and slow. As a result, decided to entirely rewrite the site. We’d invest in a modern codebase with a few goals:

  • Don’t break the user experience.
  • Ensure that we can ship faster to deliver on customer feedback.
  • Get it live as soon as possible.

With those goals in mind, we worked with a few outside contractors to speed things up and deliver value. In order to move quickly, we made the decision to develop a fork in private temporarily so as to not disrupt the main repo and confirm the basic functionality and UX was there. We received really little feedback from other contributors over the years, and always had a strained ability to get people to contribute unless we paid for the work, which honestly is very different from a lot of open source projects we’ve had exposure to.

The site is now live and it is built on top of modern technology, is blazingly fast, and is the first step to be able to deliver on customer requests faster, which was always the aim of the work. The new modern codebase is also now open source which was always part of the plan.

A few highlights of the work done on the site so far:

  • It’s fast. The Google PageSpeed test showed we improved load times from over 12 seconds to just one second, dramatically speeding up how quickly users see and interact with content.
  • Data is refreshed every four hours or so – to ensure it’s always up-to-date with pricing updates and newly launching instance types.
  • There are now custom social previews for specific EC2 instance detail pages.
  • We’ve expanded the number of services well beyond just AWS and well beyond just EC2.

We’re working our way down the list of issues and feature requests on the Github repo which we can now deliver on much quicker. If you’re a user of the site, we’d love to hear from you about the new site and how we can continue to improve it.

EC2 Instances Slide 2

ec2instances.info site with the new updates