1 am thinking of hosting a python based app on Amazon EC2. It will be really helpful to know the cost of an EC2 and S3 combo. Does typical ($7/month) shared hosting compare to the bandwidth cost + EC2 1 instance + S3 storage? (will the cost difference be minimal?) I understand that all this varies, Can you share your cost/month and your experiences with Amazon cloud in general.
PS: I am not looking for the comments on the unexpected downtime and closed SLA etc.
Well, an EC2 instance for a month costs 72$. Storage: easy to do the calculation if you know how much you will need. How are we supposed to know?
If your bandwidth needs are low, it will probably be cheaper to go with the low-cost hosting providers. Amazon EC2 pays off when you need lots of reliable bandwidth and relatively few compute instances.
No need to get estimates from other people. They have a calculator for this sort of thing.
For low end, single machine hosting, you're probably better off with the $7 hosting account. In my experience, comparing things like disk space and memory between hosting companies isn't valuable unless you plan on using every single byte. Go with the one that meets your needs the best.
That being said, if you need to scale your site up and down to meet load demands, Amazon really excels.
Per host, you can find cheaper colo, but with Amazon you only pay for what you use. If you need 50 web servers for a 8 hour peak time, but only 10 for the rest of the day, you're going to save some cash.
EC2 pricing starts at 10c/h. 0.1 * 24 * 30 = $72/month + bandwidth + storage.
EC2 nodes also aren't all that easy to set up and maintain. There is no persistent storage, you need to make sure all data is offloaded to S3 before the instance is terminated (or has this changed recently? Haven't looked into Elastic Block Store yet). To use it seriously, you need some sort of monitoring and load balancing tools, to automatically start/stop instances as needed, based on demand, and to share data between the instances. Super cool technology, but not for a small project.
Probably easier for about the same money to lease a low power P4 box, from a hosting company. If you don't need that much grunt, a VPS (Virtual Private Server) is a good start for around $15+/month. You can usually upgrade the VPS, with more processor availability, more RAM and disk, just by emailing your hosting company.
As Gary says, EC2 is perfect if your demand changes drastically over short periods of time. If that's not your situation, I'd look for another solution.
I also have this question about the cost. ServerBeach is one of the reputable hosts and they offer $75 dedicated server. The Amazon EC2 seems to be more expensive and offer less resources. Can somebody tell me when everybody is talking about money saved using EC2 and S3, what they are comparing against?
Isn't that 10 cents per cpu hour and not necessarily every single hour? I think you guys are misunderstanding them. Directly from their website: "Pricing is per instance-hour consumed for each instance type. Partial instance-hours consumed are billed as full hours."
Amazon delivers very poor customer service and for small deployments it's very expensive compared to alternatives.
I always recommend against shared hosting accounts because you're given a slot on a physical server, and slots are given out to every Tom Dick and Harry so if Dick's website causes large SQL queries to fill up the /tmp/ partition, the entire server will crash and your website will go offline because Dick didn't write his code properly.
You definitely want to have a dedicated server instead of a shared hosting account. Thing is, if you want a hardware dedicated server you're looking at hundreds of dollars per month.
The solution: Rackspace Cloud
Rackspace delivers a better service that Amazon AWS at a fraction of the cost. A basic Rackspace Cloud Server (dedicated only to you) costs around $11/mo and their customer service is astoundingly good. (For example, you can actually TALK to someone via phone or live chat, instead of having to post in community support forums. With amazon you have to subscribe to an annual service contract in order to talk to anyone, which costs around $250/year)
I highly recommend anyone looking into Amazon's EC2 or S3 services should take a look at Rackspace as it seems to be the best cloud-hosting service on the web for small deployments.
Once you hit the mark where your site is chewing through more than $5,000/mo worth of bandwidth and disk usage that's where Amazon becomes a better deal, but for small deployments Amazon is a terrible waste of money and don't expect to get any tech support unless you pay them oodles of cash for it.
Rackspace all the way! W00t!!