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Comment by manishsharan | Hacker News Reader

One of the things I hate most about AWS is their refusal to give monthly pricing for EC2 instances like Digital Ocean. Instead I have to use a web form to estimate my monthly/quarterly costs. One of the reasons I might move to DO is that I can do back of the envelope calculations so easily when projecting my costs. And bandwidth costs.

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Their billing dashboard provides a nice breakdown https://console.aws.amazon.com/billing/home?#/ and compares to your previous month

You are in a dynamic environment, a relatively static environment, or a mix of the two.

For static environments you should be buying reserved instances in year long blocks to save yourself the premium of on-demand pricing.

For dynamic environments are you really using services by the month? We scale with load and wouldn't care about monthly costs shown on their pricing page.

In our situation, a mix, we have year long reserved instances (some 3 years) and our scalability is on-demand or spot instances which changes, and is never monthly. Some months we have only a couple of days of on-demand use, other months it could be a week or 2. If we are getting to the point where there is a lot of dynamic use we add another reserved instance to the base cluster.

So I understand your frustration about monthly pricing for a quick glance, however the real world use of 'monthly' hosting is the least applicable in Amazon's eyes.

Bandwidth costs I hear you. Would love to not charge clients bandwidth, and we typically don't charge unless its over, coincidentally, 1 TB

For my personal DO servers for side projects/moonlighting, I wish they offered reserved year long pricing like Amazon.

Check out http://ec2instances.info

It will be even better when this PR is merged (soon) https://github.com/powdahound/ec2instances.info/pull/37

It's be cool if the 'annually' version could also take into account reserved pricing, since doing the 1-year reserved thing would be the sensible option if you wanted to use a machine as an always-on VPS-style box. E.g. the m1.small instance is $797.16 annually (what the page currently reports), but with 1-year "heavy utilization" reservation it ends up being a more reasonable $291.64 (including both the cost of reservation and the instance cost).

The calculator provided by Amazon does have the option of factoring in the Reserve Pricing and will give you the monthly and annual charges as separate line items.

http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/calc5.html

We posted a calculator that does exactly this: https://scalyr.com/cloud. It will let you compute a "normalized" monthly cost for the various reserved and non-reserved options, customized for your usage and cost of capital, so that you can make an apples-to-apples comparison. You can also compare with other providers.

Always happy to get feedback on this tool.

Really, if you are worrying about ongoing monthly costs with AWS, you might be better served with a different host. If you want to be billed at a monthly rate, you should think more about dedicated hardware. Unless you are spinning things up and down with some regularity (in response to demand), AWS is usually more expensive than a dedicated server.

I think that only giving the hourly costs helps to reinforce this.

(I say this not knowing anything about your particular setup...)

http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/calc5.html

720 hours in a month is always a good back of the envelope number to remember.

I don't know why you were downvoted since it is a frustration I share. It is always interesting trying to decipher our monthly charges to see where the changes occurred.

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