How is Amazon Lightsail cheaper than EC2? - amazon-web-services

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

Related

Region with Cheapest EC2

I am running a small server on AWS that the networking and other thing is not that much important. Threfore, hosting an EC2 in any region does not matter to me. I view cost as the biggest factor in choosing the region.\
My server :
t3.small with 2 Gb ram, 2 CPU, 8 Gb storage.
I wonder if anyone has this kind of experience and which region is the cheapest one?
It is likely that an Amazon Lightsail package will be a lower-cost option for you rather than using Amazon EC2.
It offers a fixed-price for compute, storage and data transfer.

Does anyone know how to reduce data transfer out charges on AWS?

I created a t3.micro EC2 instance on aws being costed at an hourly rate of $0.0065/hr. It's got 2 vCPUs and 1 GiB Memory. I manged to run a 128 tick CS:GO server on it, but the data transfer out charges are killing it. The estimated cost of this server per month is around $43, considering I only play 5 scrims (5v5 competitives) per day, and data transfer out alone costs me $38 in this case. However, some individuals are offering me a server for as low as $10 per month. What am I doing wrong? How do they do it?
You might consider moving from Amazon EC2 to Amazon Lightsail.
Lightsail has pricing plans that include volumes of Data Transfer traffic and it is designed for people who just want to launch a small number of virtual computers (eg WordPress instances) rather than configure a whole cloud infrastructure.
See: Amazon Lightsail Pricing | Virtual Private Server (VPS) | AWS

Do i have to stop my AWS lightsail instance?

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.

What in the relationship between EC2 instances and website volume

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

aws ec2 instance volumes, does this charge even if the ec2 instance in shut down

I have two ec2 instances running in aws which are currently stopped (I am using the free tier just to experiment with Azure). I noticed that even though the instances are in the stopped state I seem to be incurring a charge for (this is all I have)
S3 - Puts (This contained the sample applications which I uploaded to test)
EBS - Volumes
Is this the case? or am I missing something here.
It depends on how big the EC2 instances and their storage are.
Stopped instances themselves don't cost any further money, but EBS storage, S3 and other moving parts like ELB's will still cause charges.
You get 30GB of EBS storage free per month in the free tier, so if the total of the EBS in use is more than that, you pay.
https://aws.amazon.com/free/ nicely describes the limits of the free tier.
For further cost calculations, check out https://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html