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Comment by tigerstripe | Hacker News Reader

What kind of setup did you have for 5 servers at $50/mo on AWS? Interested to know - our EC2 instances that are about 1/4 as powerful as a laptop cost $60+/mo

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Certainly nothing powerful :-) I can get away with t3.nano and t3.micro for what I'm doing at the moment. But the beauty of cloud, is that I can scale up when I eventually need it.

5x t3.nano will be ~$25/mo 5x t3.micro will be ~$50/mo

All of my AMIs are EBS optimized and require a minimum of 8GB for the root drive (Although they only use ~1.6GB. Not bothering to hack around this to save a buck.) So that'll be 40GB EBS block storage. Plus I want ~20GB spread across 3 of the machines.

So EBS should be ~$6/mo.

I only need the volumes of those last 3, the others are good to go with their base AMI or user-data init script. So I only need snapshot backups of ~20GB. Being priced incrementally and having minimal changes, I'll only be charged ~$1/mo for that + off-site another $1/mo

So, currently experimenting with the t3.nano - Cost is ~$36/mo. One of these servers will be used as a personal VPN, and I expect ~75GB/mo coming from my laptop. So bandwidth charges at $9/mo.

Total $45/mo - For what I have planned now, at least.

That's exactly the reason I gave up on AWS, I need an accountant to do the math every month :D

Now I rent a 4GB Linux box for 5$/m with no Dockers or whatsoever and happy that it just works

I also hate this complexity with a passion. I love cloud, but pricing can be a real nightmare.

I don't use AWS specifically but when I needed to know the price of some cloud service or group of services I spin up the service (or services) in a brand new project and let it run for 24 hours under similar working environment to see the impact, then after checking the results (the breakdown of each service's price in that day) I just close the project entirely, no left overs.

So I tend to successfully avoid these strange, terribly organized, cloud-specific, service-specific calculator where I can easily forget one aspect of the service that might cost a lot of money absolutely randomly.

Obviously it is a bad strategy if things are expected to reach $200/month and/or you do 'price evaluation' frequently, but otherwise it is stupid easy. I barely spent $50 each year doing this (small company and sporadic system changes)

But the best part is that the final daily price of your system is as precise as it can possibly be and that is worth something.

And if you went with reserved instances, what does it come out to? I guess that it is fair to assume that you will need at least this level of compute power for at least a year, right?

No idea. Generally reserved instances will give you 30-75% off though, I believe.

This is for a hobby project, so no way I'm committing to that, haha.

I'm also building the architecture so that I can easily completely destroy it and restore it from backups very quickly.

So, depending what I do with it, may be destroying it regularly and just bringing online when I want it.

Cool - I should give the micro instances another shot - I wonder how big of a Postgres database they will be able to handle.

If you have a small hobby project you could use AWS Lightsail[0] which has starting prices of $3.50/mo

https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/pricing/?opdp1=pricing

Thanks! Aware of Lightsail - But I'm experienced with AWS so have no trouble with, and prefer, the full feature set. I would've gone with Digital Ocean, otherwise.

Out of curiosity, what you're missing at Digital Ocean? It seems it has all the basics (VMs, managed DBs, storage, load balancers) and for a better price than the bigger clouds.

I find it quite easy to mix services from multiple providers. For example add SQS or S3 from Amazon and Elasticsearch from elastic.co if your cloud doesn't have the products. The latency kills mostly just the connection from a web app to its database.

The biggest drawback is multiple invoices, but I think it's manageable.

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