Hacker News Reader

Comment by pieter | Hacker News Reader

Amazon isn't really budget. The free tier is nice, and the tiny instances are priced ok, but beyond that they're quite expensive for a VPs. The nice thing with AWS is the scaling and the supporting infrastructure, but you do pay for that compared to more basic VPS offerings.

View on HN

Just a reminder to everyone that prices out the flat On-Demand rates of Amazon, a 3-year reserved instance price is 48% cheaper than OnDemand.

So if you know what your deployment needs are, take the On-Demand price and roughly divide it in half for your real cost-per-month (with a majority paid up front).

If you don't know what kind of deployment you need, then yes, running everything on-demand can be pricey compared to alternatives.

In addition to reserved instances, there are a couple of other ways you can achieve cost-savings for common situations. If you need to run background tasks (like video encoding, reports, etc) you can try running spot instances at a fraction of the cost of an on-demand instance. You run the risk that the instance is terminated, but you can always spawn a new one without affecting the main service, since basically you do not care if the task finishes a couple of minutes later. Another one is scaling up and down base on demand. If you run, say, a SugarCRM instance for your sales team, you can have it run in a Large instance during the week, 9-5pm, when it is going to be in full use by multiple people. Then, the rest of the time you can scale down to a small or micro instance. It is still going to be available, but at a smaller cost.

Is that a fixed price for the next 3 years then? I would expect normal prices to at least be cut in half 3 years from now as hardware gets cheaper.

You pay a fixed price for the reservation and then per-usage fees. Usage fees will drop as Amazon reduces them, but the reservation is a one-time deal

Well, if we are talking about bigger instances, then it is not "budget VPS" anymore either :) Still, depending on your needs (and specially if you combine with reserved instances, which can drive the cost 50%) it can be quite cost-effective

Yeah, and not to forget, the free tier offer expires in November

I believe it expires an year after you started using it. Do you have a reference saying it won't be available for anyone after November 2011?

Ah, you're right, my bad.

Relevant part of the terms:

These free tiers are only available to new AWS customers and are available for 12 months following your AWS sign-up date

Reply on news.ycombinator.com