First Bill for DLTJ Hosting on Amazon Web Services

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I just got the bill for the first month of hosting this blog on Amazon Web Services. The total for the month was $23.60, and includes:

  • data transfer charges for all in-bound and out-bound content;
  • a full-time use of a LINUX micro-sized Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instance (with backup to the Elastic Block Store (EBS));
  • a Simple Storage Service (S3) bucket for static files (Cascading Style Sheet and JavaScript files, images, and other media); and
  • use of the Amazon CloudFront content distribution network.

All told, I'm pretty pleased with the costs -- particularly as I was considering the amortized cost of buying a new server to replace the one I had been using for the past five years. The itemized bill is included below.

[caption id="aws-bill" align="aligncenter" width="650" caption="January 2011 Bill for DLTJ on Amazon Web Services"]

Billing Statement:February 1, 2011
The billing cycle for this report is is January 1 - January 31, 2011.
        Totals

Amazon CloudFront

United States
    $0.150 per GB - first 10 TB / month data transfer out 3.483 GB 0.52
    $0.0100 per 10,000 HTTPS Requests 4 Requests 0.01
    $0.0075 per 10,000 HTTP Requests 265,927 Requests 0.20
        0.73
Europe
    $0.150 per GB - first 10 TB / month data transfer out 0.481 GB 0.07
    $0.0090 per 10,000 HTTP Requests 26,546 Requests 0.02
        0.09
Japan
    $0.201 per GB - first 10 TB / month data transfer out (includes consumption tax). 0.054 GB 0.01
    $0.0095 per 10,000 HTTP Requests (includes consumption tax). 2,565 Requests 0.01
        0.02
Hong Kong and Singapore
    $0.190 per GB - first 10 TB / month data transfer out 0.102 GB 0.02
    $0.0090 per 10,000 HTTP Requests 5,102 Requests 0.01
        0.03
      0.87

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud

US East (Northern Virginia) Region
  Amazon EC2 running Linux/UNIX
    $0.02 per Micro Instance (t1.micro) instance-hour (or partial hour) 744 Hrs 14.88
  Amazon EC2 EBS
    $0.10 per GB-month of provisioned storage 18.293 GB-Mo 1.83
    $0.10 per 1 million I/O requests 30,188,451 IOs 3.02
    $0.15 per GB-Month of snapshot data stored 1.898 GB-Mo 0.28
    $0.01 per 1,000 puts (when saving a snapshot) 1,822 Requests 0.02
  Amazon CloudWatch
    $0.00 per alarm-month - first 10 alarms 0.141 Alarms 0.00
      20.03

Amazon Simple Notification Service

US East (Northern Virginia) Region
    First 100,000 Amazon SNS API Requests per month are free 70 Requests 0.00
    First 1,000 Amazon SNS Email/Email-JSON Notifications per month are free 55 Notifications 0.00
      0.00

Amazon Simple Storage Service

US Standard Region
    $0.140 per GB - first 1 TB / month of storage used 0.363 GB-Mo 0.05
    $0.01 per 1,000 PUT, COPY, POST, or LIST requests 54,515 Requests 0.55
    $0.01 per 10,000 GET and all other requests 219,232 Requests 0.22
        0.82
EU (Ireland) Region
    $0.01 per 1,000 PUT, COPY, POST, or LIST requests 1 Requests 0.01
    $0.01 per 10,000 GET and all other requests 5 Requests 0.01
        0.02
      0.84
 
Amazon Virtual Private Cloud

      0.00

AWS Data Transfer (excluding Amazon CloudFront)

US East (Northern Virginia) and US Standard Regions
    $0.100 per GB - data transfer in per month 5.169 GB 0.52
    $0.000 per GB - first 1 GB of data transferred out per month 1.000 GB 0.00
    $0.150 per GB - up to 10 TB / month data transfer out 8.804 GB 1.32
    $0.010 per GB - regional data transfer - in/out/between EC2 Avail Zones or when using public/elastic IP addresses or ELB 1.784 GB 0.02
        1.86
EU (Ireland) Region
    $0.000 per GB - first 1 GB of data transferred out per month 0.000002 GB 0.00
        0.00
        1.86
Taxes

0.00
Total Charges due on February 1, 2011 $23.60

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Given the success and satisfaction level with this project on Amazon Web Services, I'm going to commit to a year-long "reserved" EC2 instance that drops the hourly cost for the instance even further. Based on running an instance continually for 732 hours per month, the cost for the EC2 part of the bill drops from $14.64 to $9.62. (The monthly total of $9.62 comes from $5.12 per month for the hourly charge plus one-twelfth of the annual $54 charge to reserve an instance.) Assuming the rest of the variables stay constant, that is $18.58 per month or about $220 per year.