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Good afternoon,
I'm helping out a friend. He has a moving company and I am about to create 5 websites for 5 different areas in the city for him.
The websites would be SPA, built in react, but otherwise static. The main feature he needs is for visitors to fill out a quote that will be emailed to him.
My current idea is to serve websites straight through S3, and build a single simple node server with middleware and API handler for each site. Is this architecture worth it? The traffic would be minimal, probably 1-50 hits a day at most. How much am I expecting him to be billed for running this thing 24/7? Is there other solution that would fit this need better, that I am not aware of?
I know Netlify has free hosting for such complexity and they have form handler for static websites but it is limited to 100 emails for a free tier.
Thank you!
TL:DR // How much would it cost to run T2-micro 24/7 with Node server that will handle no more than 100 API calls a day?
You have taken a look at AWS's monthly calculator, right?
I'd also reconsider using t3 instances instead of t2 - slightly cheaper, and they offer bursting without having to do any stuff to enable it.
Then again, it may actually be more cost effective to have a serverless design here with those tiny volumes - serve static assets on page via CloudFront, and have a Lambda function attached via API gateway that makes a call to Amazon SES to send outgoing.
The cost would basically be the sum of:
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EC2 Instance costs (per hour)
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EBS block store costs (per GB-month)
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S3 storage costs (per GB)
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Data transfer costs (per GB + per operation)
A t2.micro instance costs about $0.0116 per hour in US-East—multiply by 750 to get a rough monthly estimate, so about $8.70 per month.
... but there's a free tier!
There is a 12-month free tier that covers the cost of running a t2.micro instance for a year, so if it's a new AWS account you shouldn't need to pay for the EC2 instance the first year.
EBS also has a free tier (covering the first 30 GB, 2 million I/Os and 1 GB of snapshot storage), so it shouldn't cost anything at least in the first year assuming you don't exceed these thresholds.
S3 again also has a 12-month free tier, in this case covering 5 GB of standard storage, 20,000 GET requests and 2,000 Put Requests.. so it's possible you may not have to worry about S3 costs either if the traffic level is really as low as you claim.
And last but not least there is a 12-month free tier for data transfer as well that covers up to 15 GB of data transfer out (across all AWS services).
So it should be possible to run this application free of charge for the first year if your usage is low enough, but once the free tier expires there will be some costs like ~$10/month or around there if you stay at about the same usage level.
Lambda
An alternative to consider is using Lambda which will execute your code on-demand without having to keep a server instance running all the time. Lambda will quickly spin up one or multiple instances to handle whatever demand you have and you only get charged when Lambda needs to be invoked to execute your code.
Lambda is also part of AWS' permanent free tier, so you can continue using Lambda for free (up to 1 Million invocations per month) with no expiration date. By switching from an always-on instance to a serverless Lambda setup, you can potentially reduce the total monthly cost (after the 12-month free tier expires) to just pennies.
Lightsail
Lightsail is an alternative to AWS' EC2 service which packages server instances together with storage, data transfer, DNS management, etc. so you just pay one low monthly price and that should cover everything you need to host basic websites. Lightsail plans start at $3.50 per month which includes a single core 0.5 GB RAM server instance with 20 GB storage and 1 TB of monthly data transfer. Lightsail is free for the first month.