I think it would be useful to hear what people have built on AWS and what their monthly AWS cost is.
I'd appreciate a brief description and/or a url, an explanation if your usage is heavy on one component (database, storage, cpu, etc.), and the cost you're incurring.
EC2 micro instance running a django application EC2 micro instance running CouchDB RDS micro instance running MySQL ElastiCache micro instance running Redis S3 storage for user images 1 Lambda function for resizing images
That set up is handling roughly 1200 sessions per month at the moment and costs me roughly $15 per month, which is mainly for the second EC2 instance. If I was paying for everything it would be more like:
EC2 instances x2: $15 RDS: $25 ElastiCache: $12
The S3 and Lambda services are a bit more tricky to work it and I'll worry about it when I need to. For everything else it's roughly 750 hours per month x hourly cost.
If you've got any follow up questions let me know.
2 - m3.large hosting nginx/node apps with mongo running on them (each in different AZ) 1 - m3.xlarge has mongo and ElasticSearch running 1 - Small RDS Multi AZ instance, 5 Wordpress DB's (only 2 are really active right now) 3 - ELB's each handling a specific domain/site.
I also have an Azure A0 basic running for near the same amount $13-15/month. So a little more than EC2 reserved but a little less than EC2 on-demand. However I get a lot "freebies" on Azure (email forwarding, 5 GB in backups, et al).
If anything, I find the calculators often overestimate slightly. However YMMV.
https://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html
It allows you to enter your expected usage and works out costs from that.