I just got the bill for the first month of hosting this blog on Amazon Web Services. The total for the month was $23.60, and includes:
- data transfer charges for all in-bound and out-bound content;
- a full-time use of a LINUX micro-sized Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instance (with backup to the Elastic Block Store (EBS));
- a Simple Storage Service (S3) bucket for static files (Cascading Style Sheet and JavaScript files, images, and other media); and
- use of the Amazon CloudFront content distribution network.
All told, I’m pretty pleased with the costs — particularly as I was considering the amortized cost of buying a new server to replace the one I had been using for the past five years. The itemized bill is included below.
Given the success and satisfaction level with this project on Amazon Web Services, I’m going to commit to a year-long “reserved” EC2 instance that drops the hourly cost for the instance even further. Based on running an instance continually for 732 hours per month, the cost for the EC2 part of the bill drops from $14.64 to $9.62. (The monthly total of $9.62 comes from $5.12 per month for the hourly charge plus one-twelfth of the annual $54 charge to reserve an instance.) Assuming the rest of the variables stay constant, that is $18.58 per month or about $220 per year.