Amazon Web Services - Pricing
Amazon EC2 is free to try. There are different way to pay for Amazon EC2 instances:
On-Demand Instances
On-Demand Instances let you pay for compute capacity by the hour or second (minimum of 60 seconds) with no long-term commitments.
This frees you from the costs and complexities of planning, purchasing, and maintaining hardware and transforms what are commonly large fixed costs into much smaller variable costs.
Example:
| Instance Type | vCPU | Memory (GiB) | Price |
|---|---|---|---|
| m6g.large | 2 | 8 GiB | $0.077 per Hour |
The monthly AWS costs for the instance type mg6.large would be $0.077 * 24 (hours) * 30 (days) = $ 55.44
Advantages
- No long-term commitments
- Flexible. Useful for short-term running instances e.g., applications being developed.
Disadvantages
- Up to 40% more expensive than Reserved Instances
Reserved Instances
Reserved Instances provide you with a significant discount (up to 75%) compared to On-Demand instance pricing.
For applications that have steady state or predictable usage, Reserved Instances can provide significant savings compared to using On-Demand instance.
Example:
The majority of our customers decide to use the Standard 1-Year Term - No Upfront option.
The monthly AWS costs for the instance type mg6.large would be $ 35.26, a saving of 37% compared to On-Demand.
Advantages
- Up to 41% lower costs compared to On-Demand.
Disadvantages
- A minimum commitment of 1 year.
Recommended
We recommend ordering a Reserved Instance (We support you with that) after being live for 3-5 days.
After 3-5 days, we check the CPU utilization graphs to make sure that the current instance type is the right one.
Good to know
You still have the flexibility. The instance type can be changed to a bigger one, e.g., for marketing campaigns, and changed back when done.
For that, you pay the fixed monthly price for the Reserved Instance + the hourly On-Demand price.
Spot Instances
Amazon EC2 Spot Instances let you take advantage of unused EC2 capacity in the AWS cloud.
Spot Instances are available at up to a 90% discount compared to On-Demand prices.
Not recommended
We don't use them because they are only available at specific times, and these instance types can be terminated at any time with a two-minutes of notice.