How much does a server in AWS cost?

The quick answer is “it cannot be precisely determined”; AWS charges by the hour and keeping a server up the whole month incurs a lot of variable costs.

Nevertheless, for some usual LAMP installation with a single domain hosted by Amazon through Route 53, the lowest monthly cost one can get (using on-demand) is:

Fixed Part:

  • EC2 cost (t2.nano): $5 (approx)

  • EBS cost (8Gb default storage): $1 (approx)

  • Route 53 (1 domain): $0.5

Total: $6.5

Variable Part:

  • Route 53 queries: usually no more than a few cents, depending on the number of visits the site receives and the TTL values.

  • EC2 traffic: there are some free allowances, most likely less than $1

Total: (usually negligible compared to the fixed part)

From the (roughly) $7 for the smallest instance type with the Amazon Linux AMI one can scale up to the very limit of the credit card and then through Debt Collections and other financial issues. The instance costs are usually in double increments (e.g. a t2.micro costs twice as t2.nano, t2.small is twice as t2.micro and so on); the calculation above with a t2.large will yeld a total in the area of $80.

If the costs above seem like too much for your usage scenario then maybe AWS is not for you, but one may also want to look into:

I’m not mentioning spot instances here because AWS kills them when the spot price goes above your bid; there is no way to guarantee any service uptime on a spot instance because of this.

That’s it for today, thank you for your read!

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