This is as much as of a business question as anything else. I am trying to forecast my company's server costs (AWS EC2) into the future. However, I am stumped when forecasting the server costs. Is there some approximate relationship between website traffic volume and EC2 instances or directly with EC2 costs?
Any advice would be hugely appreciated, or if you could point me to another resource (and yes I asked AWS themselves!) that would be great.
I guess you are referring "website volume" to the amount of traffic received. If yes, then there is no relation between EC2 and the website volume.
A good place to start is to use the pricing calculators[1][2] and then try understanding the pricing option. There are 3 options. On-Demand, Reserved Instances, and Spot Instances.
Example:
Are you planning to run your instances 24/7? then a reserved instance with full upfront payment can give you 75% discount.
Pricing for m3.medium instance.
OnDemand - $586.920000 annually
Reserved(1Year Upfront) $350.400000 annually
Reserved(3Year Upfront) $227.760000 annually
Related
I just recently discovered AWS new service lightsail. Apparently you're charged by the month which is good, unlike EC2 that is billed by the minute.
However, there seems to be some extra costs, but i'm not able to find what it could be, should i stop my AWS lightsail instances when i'm not using them ?
As this is actually a hypothetical, yes there are a number of additional costs you can end up paying:
Exceeding your Network allowance will result in an additional charge.
Exceeding 3 million DNS queries per month.
Creating a Lightsail Snapshot
Lightsail Load Balancers.
For a more comprehensive list of potential additional costs, you can take a look at the Billing and account management section of the Lightsail FAQ.
Make sure that every static IP Adress is connected to an lightsail instance. This happened to me.
I'm getting ready to launch a mobile app that I have hosted on AWS with an EC2 instance. ($0.0464 per On Demand Linux t2.medium Instance Hour).
This past month I was charged $112 for the EC2 usage, but only had a handful of internal users testing the private version of the app. It's a fairly simple app, not anything that should require a lot of computing power.
So what I'm wondering is if 10 users and dev team costs $112/mo, what happens if I get 1,000 users, or 10k users? Would the cost increase 100x, 1000x? I can't imagine getting auto-billed for $112,000 for a month of service with a small user base like 10k users.
Thanks for any help and guidance, I don't know much about AWS.
Here are the details of my billing for last month:
The billing page shows 2219 hours of t2.medium during this billing month.
That is the equivalent of 92 days. So, it might be 3 instances running for a full month.
Amazon EC2 is charged when the instance is in the Running state. If you are not using an instance, you can Stop the instance. The attached disks (EBS) will still be charged, but there will be no charge for the instance itself.
The charge is not based on the number of users, nor how 'busy' the instance is. It is simply charged when the instance is 'running'. This is because computer resources are exclusively assigned to instances (CPU, RAM) that nobody else can use.
Bottom line: Stop instances that you don't need. Use the smallest instance type for your use-case to reduce costs.
If you were not aware of the charges involved, you can contact AWS Customer Service and request a refund.
FYI, the T2 and T3 family are great for workloads that occasionally 'burst' but then have low-usage periods, but they are not great for sustained workloads. See: Burstable performance instances - Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
There is only one apparently abstract upside of using Lightsail, simplicity, or significantly simplified interface.
Also, the first page of Lightsail talks about lower charges.
My question is how is it considered to reduce charges compared to EC2? Consider $5 Lightsail plan which charges $0.0067/hour of an instance (which is the cheapest) where EC2's same type of instance (t2.nano) costs just $0.0059/hour.
What am I missing? A detailed price comparison would be much appreciated showing how Lightsail costs lower as advertised.
The $5 Amazon LightSail plan includes:
A CPU that appears similar to a t2.nano ($0.0059c/hr in US regions) = approximately $4.25/month
20GB SSD storage, similar to Amazon EBS general purpose SSD (10c/GB/month) = $2/month
1TB data transfer (9c/GB = approximately $92 in US regions)
So, the real saving appears to be in Data Transfer.
Also with lightsail you get a static IP built into the price, with ec2 it’s about $4/month
I am in the process of learning more about Amazon AWS. I want to turn off my Amazon Elastic Beanstalk EC2/RDS services. I have selected the minimum service entries, but I am still racking up small service charges. How do I do this?
have selected the minimum service entries, but I am still racking up
small service charges.
It isn't clear what you are saying with that sentence. Do you mean to say that you are within the limits of the free tier and yet you are still getting charged?
If you want to just "turn off" your EC2 and RDS instances then delete/terminate them. Afterwards look at the EBS snapshots and volumes, and the RDS snapshots and delete any of those that are still there. That will most likely stop the charges.
If you want to know exactly what you are being charged for so that you can zero in on the culprit you can enable detailed billing.
AWS has pretty good documentation on setting up and terminating instances. Here's a page with instructions on how to terminate an environment using the AWS Management Console:
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/latest/dg/using-features.terminating.html.
I´m quite new with Amazon Web Services. Some months ago, I created a m3.medium instance on demand. According to AWS EC2 prices, this instance is 0.077$/hour. This means 55,44$/month (november). However, I got a billing of 74.76$ (91.12$ with taxes).
I guess I have some service that I´m missing and maybe they are charging me:
In example, I have an Elastic Load Balancer. Am I getting charged for that? Actually, I have realized I had two ELB. It looks like I created it another one for testing purposes and I forgot it there.
I also have an Elastic Block Store (EBS) with 8GB of size. Am I getting charged for that? Do I really need it?
When I check my billing status, I don´t see any reference to these both two services. So, I guess they are included in the EC2 billing, right?
I don´t know where I got the idea that when you start an EC2 instances, an ELB and EBS was included with no additional charges.
As you can see, I´m quite lost with these services.
Billing information is available from the account menu (in the top-right, next to the Region menu). It will display a simple breakdown of charges by service:
More detailed billing information is available by clicking the "Bill Details" link (in the top-right). It will show a breakdown of charges by service for any selected month:
EBS charges are included under "Elastic Compute Cloud":
To answer your questions:
Elastic Load Balancer pricing
Elastic Block Store (EBS) pricing: This is the disk storage for Amazon EC2. You will be charged for any volumes from the time they are created until they are deleted.
There is also a Free Usage Tier that includes 30GB of EBS storage each month in your first year (amongst other services). If you use services within this free tier, there will be no charge.