Migrating to the cloud is an important step for any company because it gives them much more flexibility and agility in their processes, plus a long amount of services to use, but, is important to say that in some cases this turns counterproductive, or if you consider AWS Managed services this provide ongoing management and monitoring of your AWS Cloud resources and applications. A lot of times happens that the cost amazon web services hosting cost, the AWS pricing, increases by passing the months, time after the migration. Get a completely FREE guide on How to reduce costs on AWS. It doesn’t mean that AWS is expensive, it means that our resources are not being properly controlled.
In this blog, I’ll show what would be the ideal expense for some types of environment, from something very basic to a real production environment using 3 or more AWS services.
Table of content
How does the AWS Pricing Works?
amazon web services hosting costs vary and depend on the service that you are using. These prices can be calculated by different methods, but the main one is for the time of usage, as Amazon (AWS) says so, you pay for what you use. Hours are the main factor on this method, followed by the minutes and seconds of use of certain services.
In this case, I’m going to detail different services which will be located in the region of US East – Virginia. Is important to mention that prices vary depending on the location of our resources.
The services we are always going to see on our AWS bill will be the basic ones:
Storage
- EBS – $ 0.010 GB per hour
- S3 – $ 0.023 GB per month
Computing power
In other words, servers and services that we are going to use to process all the information of our application.
- EC2 (Price depends of our server type, starting from 5 USD to over 150 USD x month)
- Load Balancer (15 USD x 750 hrs)
- Elastic IP
Networking
Amazon charges all the data that is transferred outside of their own network, that is to say, that everything that we want to move in and out of AWS will cost us. This is one of the main services that shows our bill and there are different costs:
- Inbound traffic – It’s free
- Outbound traffic – Starting with 0.09 per GB <10 TB
I should mention that the traffic inside of Amazon (between instances, services or regions) is cheaper than the traffic handled outside of Amazon.
A clear example of how costs vary in AWS is Fargate Pricing; read the blog for real-life cases.
Example Architectures
Basic Environment – (Website Hosting) $100 to $200 USD Monthly
Intermediate Environment – (High Performance Website Hosting) $250 to $600 USD Monthly
Advanced Environment – (Highly Scalable and Available) $600 to $2500 USD Monthly
Of course, all these prices can vary depending on the type of the EC2 instance, the type of RDS (if it is multi-region), the traffic/load, the CloudFront caching and the required storage, etc.
Extra Tips for AWS Savings
- Use Spot Instances
- Use Reserved Instances
- Use fully managed services
- Use Dedicated instances for the required type of work
- Monitor Amazon CloudWatch cost
- Always consider the bandwidth
To sum up
As you can see, determining a cost for any application can be a challenge if you ignore the cloud computing services. Every cost varies according to the type of app in the Cloud and the type of work that it manages. Here in ClickIT, we can help you optimize the AWS pricing and reduce your AWS billing, to prevent billing surprises.
Also read: AWS Security Tools
