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Ask HN: Examples of Amazon AWS monthly cost

9 points by heliodor ↗ HN
Trying to figure out Amazon AWS pricing from their price tables and calculator is an exercise in head scratching.

I think it would be useful to hear what people have built on AWS and what their monthly AWS cost is.

I'd appreciate a brief description and/or a url, an explanation if your usage is heavy on one component (database, storage, cpu, etc.), and the cost you're incurring.

6 comments

[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 21.5 ms ] thread
grhmc
Related: ec2.gsc.io and ec2instances.info
Stoo
Storytella[0] is running on AWS. Currently I'm trying to keep costs down so everything is running on micro instances which are free for 12 months for new sign ups. I have set up:

EC2 micro instance running a django application EC2 micro instance running CouchDB RDS micro instance running MySQL ElastiCache micro instance running Redis S3 storage for user images 1 Lambda function for resizing images

That set up is handling roughly 1200 sessions per month at the moment and costs me roughly $15 per month, which is mainly for the second EC2 instance. If I was paying for everything it would be more like:

EC2 instances x2: $15 RDS: $25 ElastiCache: $12

The S3 and Lambda services are a bit more tricky to work it and I'll worry about it when I need to. For everything else it's roughly 750 hours per month x hourly cost.

If you've got any follow up questions let me know.

[0] https://storytel.la/

wernerb
Be careful, I think you get alotted free machine hours. This means that if you use multiple micro instances you will spend those free hours more quickly.
Someone1234
When I was on the free tier I ran a micro instance for around $3-4 month, mostly in bandwidth. After the free tier expired the same setup was around $14-15/month on AWS on-demand and around $11-12/month with a reserved instance (inc. upfront fee divided by months).

I also have an Azure A0 basic running for near the same amount $13-15/month. So a little more than EC2 reserved but a little less than EC2 on-demand. However I get a lot "freebies" on Azure (email forwarding, 5 GB in backups, et al).

If anything, I find the calculators often overestimate slightly. However YMMV.

davismwfl
So I am temporarily running a couple of small ecommerce sites for clients and my own SaaS application. The spend is about $650-700/month for a redundant solution plus bandwidth, backups, S3 etc. I am actually working through a change right now that will cut our bill down to about $400/month without losing anything today. Once the clients migrate their sites as planned then I can likely get my spend down to about $300/month given current traffic to the SaaS. Everything is on-demand no reserved instances right now since most of this is temporary.

2 - m3.large hosting nginx/node apps with mongo running on them (each in different AZ) 1 - m3.xlarge has mongo and ElasticSearch running 1 - Small RDS Multi AZ instance, 5 Wordpress DB's (only 2 are really active right now) 3 - ELB's each handling a specific domain/site.