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.
Thanks, great info! Keep us posted!
Hi. So after a year, are you still happy with the move or have you gone back to a dedicated server ?
Unfortunately I no longer work for the company that I deployed the EC2 instance for. But as far as I’m aware they’re still using it pretty successfully.
I have however continued to use EC2 where it’s been appropriate in my new job. We’ve used EC2 to host the site that we do live streaming of Champions League football from and used it to host some analytics stuff that was only required for a short period of time. Not to mention moving a lot of our static files out to S3 / Cloudfront.
Very happy with AWS overall and I’m looking at what else i can take advantage of in the application I’m building at the moment.