Erwan Macé – Passionate Geek

We all know Amazon as the leading e-commerce website in the world, selling millions of books. But did you know that for the past few years, Amazon has also been playing a leading role in Cloud Computing? Under the name of AWS (Amazon Web Services), the number one book seller offers a variety of cloud computing services such S3 (Simple Storage Service), CloudFront (a CDN competing with Akamai), Simple DB and RDS (online databases), etc… One of their most popular services is called EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) and provides “resizable compute capacity in the cloud”.  It literally allows you to get servers on-demand. Build and scale your infrastructure as it grows. If Amazon advertises this EC2 service as a great way to save cost on scaling big infrastructure for high-demand traffic, it is also a great way for smaller setups to build as little as one server.

In less than half a day yesterday, I got my very own EC2 server up and running and migrated this blog from wordpress.com as well as my company website from Google App Engine. Make sure to read more to find out the real cost and read this other post to find out how I handled the entire setup.

The Cost: USD 40 /month excluding bandwidth

Amazon EC2 offering might not seem very clear when it comes to pricing. You only pay for what you use, on a per hour basis. You’ll also need to choose between on-demand instances, reserved instances and spot instances, as well as between a few pre-defined configurations (storage, memory, processor, linux vs windows).

If, like me, the goal is to host a modest web site, you’ll probably need the smallest basic setup but will definitely want it to be running full time, 365/24/7. A reserved instance with a small linux configuration is what I went for and here is what Amazon charges for it:

• reservation fees per year (reserving an instance allows you to pay a lower “per hour usage fee”): USD 227.50
• per-hour usage: USD 0.03 (thats 365*24*0,03 = USD 262,8 for a year)
• total Monthly Cost (excl. taxes): USD40.86 !!!

This gives you the equivalent of a 32-bit “virtual core” processor, 1.7 GB of RAM and 160GB of storage. More than enough for a small website like this one. You may want to check here for other types of servers/instances that Amazon offers. And check out their pricing calculator as well.

Don’t forget to add your bandwidth usage: depending on your actual traffic, they’ll charge you USD 0.08 to USD 0.15 per GB per month (1GB will roughly give you 5,000 page views weighing 200KB each, and one million of these page views will cost you USD 30). Be sure to adapt my estimation if your pages are heavier and/or if you are delivering rich media content.

Conclusion:

Google App Engine and WordPress.com are free and great services which I highly recommend. But running your own server gives you so much more flexibility that in my case, the USD 40/ month are definitely well spent !! Moreover, as much as I like Python, I am much more comfortable writing PHP, accessing standard relational databases and configuring Apache.