I run some small servers at home, I know a bit about AWS, does it make sense to go into the cloud?
Example services I am running now in my closet:
ssh (admin and backup target for workstations)
docker
nextcloud @docker
bitwarden @docker
ttrss @docker
certbot (ssl certificates) @docker
apache reverse proxy for all those services
ddclient (domain hosted on a service that offers dyndns)
backup to external hdd
What would be the AWS way to do this and is it affordable?
I could put the same services onto an EC2 instance, point a Route53 A-record there - quick, easy, ugly solution.
The cloud native way would probably be:
Route 53
load balancer as SSL reverse proxy
ECS for docker containers
S3 for backup
maybe an additional ec2 for admin login
I am new to ECS and haven’t fully figured it out yet, it seems it can either run on EC2 or Fargate and while Fargate is super flexible when scaling up, I am not sure it is cheaper for tiny workloads.
So the costs add up: ECS-EC2 maybe $60, load balancer $30, S3 cheap tier $10 maybe (??), admin machine $40 — it seems the minimal setup would cost me somewhere around $100 to 140 a month or at least 1200 per year. That’s a lot of home server.
Am I missing anything? Any advice for cost-optimizing small workloads?
What Is the AWS Price List?
The AWS Price List is a collection of the products and the prices of services you can access on AWS.
Is AWS Free for 1 Year?
Various AWS products, including Elastic Load Balancing and Amazon EC2, are free for 12 months.
What Are the 3 Pricing Models of AWS?
The three pricing models of AWS are pay-as-you-go, Reserved Instances and Savings Plans. That said, Dedicated Hosts and Spot Instances also have unique pricing.
Does anyone use AWS for their personal projects? I was thinking about it for my small personal website, but I know I'd end up with ELB, RDS, Route53, S3 back ups, and a $5000/month bill.
I'm curious what personal things people are using it for, and much they're paying per month.
I host my personal blog on AWS. It's Ghost (Node.js blogging platform) deployed as a Docker image to a single-instance Elastic Beanstalk environment. Uses RDS for the database and the blog uploads all content to S3. Using t2.micros for both RDS and the EC2 instance deployed by Beanstalk. I purchased 1-year light RIs for both instances bringing the total monthly cost to ~$15. For that I get fault tolerance (Beanstalk monitors the instance and replaces as necessary), backups (RDS does this automatically), and durability (images go to S3).
All provisioned with a CloudFormation template that's stored in GitHub along with my custom Ghost theme and Dockerfile. Totally overkill, but amazing what can be done for $15/mo.
I run a bunch of dumb personal sites (like www.themostamazingwebsiteontheinternet.com) that traffic tens of thousands of views. I run it all on a single micro EC2 instance with CloudFront for image CDN. Costs me under $20/mo.
Edit: Correction
The physical server that I just purchased is MUCH MUCH cheaper than what AWS is offering. What am I missing?
you are not missing anything, in the contrary, you just discovered the pain of the cloud.
We have a client who DEMANDED cloud (AWS) after he had old and issues with hardware.
Now hes spending about 2 grand a month on AWS. that is about $22k a year.
With hardware and license and such physical hardware and local virtualization would be in less than 2 years WAY cheaper. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
AWS / cloud is not really cheap, but then again, no one really goes to the cloud for the price but for scalability, availability and reliability.
Unless you are a micro business as in you have a single server that you only need for QuickBooks or whatever, most of the time AWS is usually always more expensive in the long run.
Hi All,
I am just getting involved with AWS due to the low prices that are offered. I am confused about something:
I just purchased a physical Dell server running Windows 2012 with SQL std for about $6k. Imagine my surprise when I look at the cheapest offering from AWS that offers the same Windows 2012 with SQL std and the reserved price (all upfront) is $6k per year. The physical server that I just purchased is MUCH MUCH cheaper than what AWS is offering. What am I missing?
I make web games, like this one. My games aren't super popular, maybe 10k DV between all my games. Before, when i hosted on AWS, I was paying upwards of $500/month on AWS, with 2 or 3 small instances behind cloudflare (which carried half of the load). Most of the fees weren't EC2, but "data transfer fees."
Even behind cloudflare, I could barely make a profit with the cost of AWS. Note that I only used AWS for the webservers, to serve the files (maybe a 10MB payload for each uncached page load). I didn't even use it for game servers, where most of the bandwidth was being used (with websockets data for multiplayer networking). I've since switched to a smaller, cheaper cloud provider which I won't name so this post doesn't sound like an advertisement. I'm paying maybe 6X less on hosting, and I feel like I'm also getting more CPU/RAM bang for my buck.
Anyway, my question is, why is AWS so damn expensive? It's a great service and I used to recommend it to everyone. But 5-6X market rate is just not worth it for the extra features (like elastic ip addresses and AMIs). How does AWS get away with charging so much?