The Cost of Hosting Websites on Amazon EC2
Posted: February 7th, 2009 | Author: James | Filed under: Web Development, Work | Tags: amazon ec2, aws, cloud computing, fasthosts, hosting, servers, virtualisation | 3 Comments »As mentioned previously once of the last few things I did in my previous position at ocean70 was to migrate their existing dedicated server over from a 2 year old Fasthosts dedicated box to an Amazon EC2 instance. That was a little over a month ago now so I thought it would be interesting to take a look at the cost for the set up in comparison to the dedicated box used previously.
To put things in perspective the box we were replacing was a 2 and a half year old Fasthosts DS 400 running Fedora 6 clocking in at £69 + vat a month (£81 in total). In the box was a 2.8ghz Pentium 4, 1gb of Ram and a 120gb IDE hard drive. At the time this was enough for our needs – but despite regular backups and an in-house server available for failover there was always the chance that this would go down and we would be in a right mess. Luckily that hadn’t happened and time was right to move our hosting to EC2.
One month has passed on EC2 and i wanted to take a look at how much the server has cost to run for a month. Total charges clocked in at $125.46 (including taxes) which at todays exchange rate equates to £84.77. Not too shabby for a vastly improved infrastructure.
To actually have the AMI running 24/7 for a month (and remember, January is a long month) clocked in at $81.84 (£55.30) while the transfer in of 23gb cost $2.30 (£1.55) and our outgoing transfer of 25gb cost $4.27 (£2.88). To put the bandwidth costs into perspective the instance is home to about 8 or so websites receiving fairly low traffic (max 100 uniques a day each). The only other significant cost being the 120gb EBS block which cost $15.00 (£10.13) for the month.
So thats a £5 a month increase for a system whose hardware will never date. Can be brought back up in 5 minutes should anything go wrong. Has virtually limitless storage facility, and on top of that is a hell of a lot faster than its predecessor. Bargain. Will be interested to see how it averages out over the year, especially as a few more sites are put on it.