I never used Amazon EC2 or RDS Service. I am trying to calculate my cost using http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/calc5.html
I searched a little but could locate answers to some basic things. Can you help me out with this:
What does DB Instance means? 1 Database = 1 Instance or 1 Connection = 1 Instance
How to calculate hours/month usage? It should depend on the transfer rates or processing time. Is there a way I can get rough Idea about it?
What if I already have my DB Ready and want to upload it directly (it would be few GBs) then how will it be calculated.
I am new to amazon EC2 and searched stackoverflow and serverfault before posting this question. Got some idea but not specific what I am looking for. Can someone help me out here?
In general, one database = one instance. You spin up instances, and do what you like with them. Definitely possible to have more connections to it.
Hours per month is just that. How many hours per month you have the instance active. If you plan to have the instance active 24/7, you may find more cost effective alternatives with other cloud providers. If you run it less often than that, you save money when it's not active. It's billed hourly to your account at the rate specified.
Upload data is counted at the standard transfer rates. A few GBs doesn't cost much, but you will be paying for the service starting the moment you spin up the instance.
Related
pardon me if this isn't the place to ask such question. But I have finished my project and thinking to deploy it using amazon elastic beanstalk and got a huge worry. My worry is that my project's database can be humongous. It's a community website like a reddit that users can create a page that other people can post text,link,pic,video(youtube). Also users get a profile page, and are able to comment as well. This was my first big project, and I don't want to pay more than $200 for server fee every month.
should I still deploy this? or just be happy I proved myself I can make this? how much do you think I'll have to pay assuming I get about (max)100 users?
For starters, you can look at the costs for any AWS service by going to that services 'homepage' and clicking "Pricing" usually on the left side. I typically get to the pricing page by Googling "AWS <> Pricing" (e.g. "AWS EC2 Pricing").
Whether or not you incur any cost and what that cost is, really depends on how you deploy your website. Questions like, is your database self-managed (i.e. installed on your own EC2 instance) or are you using RDS? Are you using S3 to store static content? Will you be serving your web contents via Cloudfront (AWS' CDN)?
Many of the basic services (EC2, S3, RDS, etc.) have free-tiers which will allow you to use them for free, provided you stay within certain (and usually very low) levels of usage.
If your database is going to get VERY large, and cost is your primary concern, it's usually more cost-effective to manage it on your own EC2 server, however then things like updates, security, scaling, backups, etc. all become your problem to deal with and often can incur additional cost (i.e. your backups will likely require volume snapshots which will cost you vs. RDS' backups are free).
If you're going to have a significant amount of static content, it will be more cost effective to host it on your own EC2 server, however again, all maintenance will be your responsibility, such as backups and scaling (which can incur cost) to meet demand vs. all of that is taken care of by S3, though you pay each time a file is accessed.
If cost is your primary concern, my suggestion is to start out your development using the AWS services (RDS, S3 maybe Elastic Beanstalk), though that can often complexity to your development efforts (dealing with authentication, additional SDK's, etc.). You can typically and pretty easily roll out your own service (MySQL, EBS filesystem to replace S3, etc.) as replacement. Additionally, again depending on your roll-out, there can be network traffic costs. Usually, this isn't a problem if you're doing things the way Amazon wants you to, but...it wouldn't be unheard of.
To get you started:
https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/
https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/
https://aws.amazon.com/rds/pricing/
Additionally, there is a nifty calculator which can help you estimate your costs. You will need to know what your traffic expectations as well as service requirements are, but you can play around with those numbers.
https://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html
You don't have to worry about charges. As AWS has a Free tier which offers most of the services free for 12 months.
https://aws.amazon.com/free/
You can have 01 t2.micro (1 vCpu + 1 gb RAM) instance for Elastic beanstalk (EBS) with auto scaling turned off, purchase Reserved instances by making 1 or 3 year all upfront payment to save more.
https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/purchasing-options/reserved-instances/
You must use Relational Database Service (RDS) for database, instead of installing db in your EBS instance & store files on Simple Storage Service (S3).
RDS Pricing is $0.100 per GB-month, after first 12 months. So you dont need to worry about the database size.
After first 12 months, your monthly bill would be less than USD 50.
On production, we are using 2 t2.micro instances (Windows) with 1 Ms Sql database on RDS & we only have to pay for the extra EC2 machine, about USD 14 per month.
I did find some relevant information in the below stackoverflow thread which talks about the capabilities of t2.micro,t2.small & t2.medium ec2 instances.Do have a look at it.
several t2.micro better than a single t2.small or t2.medium
I have a google app engine application that uses the cloud datastore. My application usage is increasing, I cannot maintain it as “free” since I am paying
for the read/write operations to the datastore
the storage of data in the cloud
instance hours
I plan to charge “by the drink.” In other words, as I am charged for application usage, I will pass on that charge on to my clients. Before developing my own solution to do this, I realize that there must be countless others who have solved this problem. If so, what technique(s) have you employed?
Thank you in advance for your suggestions.
Unfortunately there is no silver bullet for this situation. Be advised, unless you really think this through keeping track of your users consumption might end up costing as much as the actual usage.
Without knowing anything else about your app its hard to help but my advice would be to use appstats to figure out the actual cost of a given service and charge the user per time accessed.
Most users do not like (actually, hate) to be charged for something they (a) do not understand, and (b) have no control over. If a phone company tells its customers to go ahead and use their service without telling them how much - exactly - they are going to pay, it will lose all customers in no time. How are you going to explain read/write datastore costs to your users, with indexed properties and all? How about query costs and instance hours? It's a difficult task even if all of your customers are software engineers.
I recommend charging users for something they understand, like creating a free and a premium version of your app with additional features, or charging per game, or per document processed (you did not tell us what your app is doing), etc.
We are running an eCommerce venture that has around 2000 unique visitors in a day. The total data is around 6 GB as of now.
We are using SQL Server as our database and in the coming months the website may scale up to 10000 users per day.
From this link deciphered that it would be best to use M1 instance but could anyone help really clueless as to what to purchase from these options.
Note: Our budget is around 170 Dollars PM.
EDIT: The number of concurrent users we have had is around 150
I'd try to fit everything in memory. If you can't due to budget, you need to make sure the disk response times are up to par for your expected load. You application can vary widely. One visit to a homepage could generate many queries, or maybe you have application caching set up - so it's hard for anyone to just tell you. You should also get solid numbers on your peak number of concurrent users so you can plan for that. You don't mention your current environment, but you can get some numbers about CPU, Disk MB Read/Writes/s and memory used to help you get the right size.
I'd look at the xlarge m1. That gives you 15GB of memory to play with. You'll be able to cache all the data you need and have some left over for the OS and also have some room to grow. CPU probably won't be your issue, but be sure to check out your current use.
If you have some time to spend on it, I'd try setting up JMeter to do some load testing and see how many concurrent users you can max out with one of the cheaper options.
This topic may be better suited to ServerFault.
I'd suggest you to check at the reserved instances in heavy category where you can get interesting discounts if you plan to run it for a year or similar.
But with that budget you should be thinking about an m1.medium instance, which might be a little tight for your requirements.
I have a background in web programming where both the data and the code live on the server. Web hosts with mysql or the like are plentiful and cheap so using the application from multiple pcs was never a problem.
However I'm considering switching to building desktop applications but the only factor that annoys me is the syncing of data across the many pcs I use. I was thinking of perhaps setting up a light amazon ec2 instance with a postgresql on it and having my desktop applications use that.
I have a few questions:
I'm curious as to what latency I might expect by running the database on ec2 instead of the local network, any experience or insight is appreciated.
Are there better/more obvious/cheaper solutions?
I've looked at the pricing and it seems to come down to 24.48$ per month for a yearly contract. Whilst not really expensive, it is not exactly cheap either. At what point does it become more interesting to run a local server?
I'm obviously not using my applications for large parts of the day (sleep, work,...). I was wondering if I can have the amazon server go into a sort of "sleep" mode and wake up when poked. An initial delay for the first desktop application is acceptable. The reason behind this behavior would be to save money on the instance if it is only actually needed for 10% of the day.
I welcome any feedback at all on how this problem is best tackled.
This could get ugly. Every single query you do will have latency associated with it. If you have a lot of queries, this can add up very fast. So keep your query count low, and try to pre-fetch and cache data when possible.
Not enough information to answer that question.
Depends on the cost of your local server. Keep in mind that you will need to pay for electricity to keep it on.
You can stop your instance when you are not needing it, with the exception of high utilization reservations, you wont get billed when its in stopped state. With high utilization reservations you will still pay the full cost.
I have developed a mobile application which is using extensively web services. It connects to my shared hosting server to get real-time information. Therefore, making sure the server is up is extremely important. Otherwise I am going to lose customers.
Some background. I changed no less than 3 hosting providers because they were not very reliable in terms of uptime. My currrent hosting is way better than those previous three, have I used it now for over a year, they have 99.9% uptime guarantee and all, but today I had about 3 hours of downtime. Which is why I am creating this post.
Not all of us small developers can afford expensive dedicated hosting, or have our own servers at home (which is not a guarantee it never will be down). In my case, having shared hosting for a very reasonable $10-15/month is OK. Except for those few hours it might be down.
One idea I have to deal with this is the following: have a second (different) shared hosting with another provider, and make the app to default to using this second hosting when my primary host is down. It's very unlikely that both will be down at the same time. I am going to pay only a few dollars extra per month for this, not 10 times more per month as I would for a dedicated hosting.
I am sure I am not the first person in this situation. Have anyone found a good way to deal with this problem, not requiring deep pockets? We are after all talking only about short periods of downtime on the primary server.
Thanks in advance for your suggestions.
If you are relying on a third party host and don't want to pay for greater reliability then a second server is the way to go. Depending on your application and budget you will also need to consider:
Database access and synchronization
Hosts in different physical locations
Multiple domain names and/or load balancing
If you opt to use multiple hosts and switch to a different (backup) host if one (the first) fails then you should aim to always have both (all) always in use. This way you won't get caught out trying/having to switch over to a "backup" server. By always using both (all) you can be sure that they are both (all) always up to date and working.
If your service is so critical that a couple of hours down time would be unacceptable to your users, then it should be easy to get the users to pay for that kind of reliability. This could fund hosting with a provider who can provide a greater level of up time or a second site. This will also help fund the time and effort to set all this up. ;)