As an experiment I want to work a bit with AWS. How much might I expect to pay?

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+3 Q:

As an experiment I want to work a bit with AWS. How much might I expect to pay?

I'm about to go to Pycon, and while I have my hosting at Webfaction one of the tutorials (JKM) asks for students to have AWS instances. I've been trying to figure out what some minimum charge examples might look like? I'll have a lamp server with Django and a requisite amount of storage but next to no traffic.

Anyone have some guidance/advice? My Google searches and look here did not turn up much useful info.

+6 A:

It depends on how long you need to run your instance. A small linux instance will cost 8.5 cents per hour. If you spend a week at Pycon and have your instance running the entire week, it would cost $14.28 for the week. You probably won't need it while you are asleep, so you can turn it off when you are done each day. If you only need it for an hour it will cost you 8.5 cents.

Here's more details on the pricing if you need a bigger server or you need a windows server instead: http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/#pricing

Jay Askren 2010-02-07 01:46:41

8.5 cents per hour, not minute!

Steven Schlansker 2010-02-07 01:48:20

Thank you. That was a typo. The $14.28 is correct though. I fixed the answer.

Jay Askren 2010-02-07 01:53:48

Well actually $14.28 per week is really sort of high compared to something like rackspace cloud at about $20/ per month unless I'm missing something,, Of course the "only while you use it is a big piece of that, but as soon as you leave it on for 24x7 it gets pretty pricey? But for my immediate purposes I suppose it is not a bad deal as long as I remember to shut it down!

dartdog 2010-02-07 02:01:42

Would this be a good use case for "spot instance?

dartdog 2010-02-07 02:04:38

I run all my stuff on EC2 nowadays. Yes it's not the cheapest thing if you do the on-demand pricing. However, buying a reserved instance drops the price dramatically. I pay about $25/mo. for a small instance, it's bandwidth, and a bit of persistent storage on EBS or S3. But for the OP's short-term usage, I'd recommend that he just pay the standard rate.

jamieb 2010-02-07 02:22:43

Probably not. Lets say you bid 4 cents an hour. As soon as others are willing to pay 5 cents a minute, you lose your instance. If that is in the middle of your tutorial, you have to then start a new instance. With AWS if you are willing to commit to a year or three years, you can reserve an instance for that time and pay less per hour. See the section on reserved instances on the pricing page. I don't know how the specs of the rackspace instance compares to the Amazon instance.

Jay Askren 2010-02-07 02:39:40

+2 A:

I think the AWS calculator might help also for estimating cost. See http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/calc5.html

Rodney Quillo 2010-02-12 05:35:45

ansaurus

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As an experiment I want to work a bit with AWS. How much might I expect to pay?

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