EC2 Micro Instance Saved Me $120 A Year
Update: Nathan Peel pointed out that I missed the $0.007 hourly usage in my calculation. I originally said that I saved $180 a year, it’s actually $120. Thanks Nathan for the correction!
Please note that what I’m writing here is more applicable to web sites with low traffic and storage requirement.
I’ve been a happy Slicehost user for the past 2.5 years. I used Slicehost for hosting this blog and some other web sites. I used their 256 slice plan at $20 per month, i.e $240 per year which includes 36.5 days bonus. I know there are cheaper hosting plans out there, but none provides the combination of excellent reliability, full root access, easy to use domain management, excellent support and documentation, and competitive price.
That was until two weeks ago when Amazon announced their EC2 Micro instance plan of 613Mb for only $54 a year plus $0.007 per hour of usage for a reserved instance. I immediately gave it a few test runs and found plenty of nice things about it. I really like their on-demand instance, I could start and stop the instance any time I want and they only charged me for the total time it was running. I also like having the ability to choose which region the instance is hosted: US West, US East, Asia Pacific, or Europe. And their documentation is very complete if not too much to read through.
The only downside is that EC2 doesn’t have any domain management service, but luckily Go Daddy, where I bought my domain names from, has Total DNS Control. It’s not as convenient to use as Slicehost’s domain management but still usable enough, and best of all, it’s free.
Some numbers from the plans (valid at the time of writing):
| Slicehost 256 slice | Slicehost 512 slice | Amazon EC2 Micro Instance | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Memory | 256MB | 512MB | 613MB |
| Bandwidth | 150GB | 300GB | $0.15/GB/month (*) |
| Storage | 10GB | 20GB | $0.10/GB/month (*) |
| Pricing | $20 x 12 = $240/year | $38 x 12 = $456/year | $54 + ($0.007 x 24 x 365) = $115.32/year |
(*) not included in the yearly cost.
This blog and some other web sites I’m maintaining only use 2GB/month bandwidth usage and less than 1GB storage. So let’s count that at $0.15 * 2 * 12 = $3.6/year for bandwidth, and $0.10 * 1 * 12 = $1.2/year for storage, which brings the yearly cost to $115.32 + $3.6 + $1.2 = $120.12. Rounding that to $120 and I’m saving $120 per year.
In summary, I no longer have any reason to keep using Slicehost. I think the Slicehost crew is amazing, but cost-wise, I simply can’t ignore Amazon’s offering.
This blog is now hosted on an Amazon EC2 Micro instance.
Node.js Discussion On Teman Macet Podcast
Last May, I recorded a discussion in Indonesian language on Teman Macet podcast with the show’s host, Ronald Widha, and another guest who was a fellow NodeJS user, Julius Sirait. The discussion itself was more on NodeJS introduction and sharing what we had learnt thus far. The episode, #51 nodeJS bersama Julius Sirait dan Cliffano Subagio, was available for streaming/download in July.
NodeJS is one piece of technology that I’m very excited about. For web application development, I think Node, along with its web stack, is a nice middle ground between Ruby/Rails magical ‘simplicity’ and Java/JEE layers of complexity. For network-related stuffs, (I’m quoting Sami Samhuri here) NodeJS is a swiss army knife. Oh, and have I mentioned that NodeJS is fast? like seriously da*n fast? (thanks to V8).
As a side note, Indonesia is currently undergoing a strong growth in mobile Internet penetration, and with 200+ million people in the market, the progress is very exciting to watch. Teman Macet is one of the best podcast shows, technical or not, in Indonesian language. I personally find it immensely useful at providing information about Indonesian start ups and technology practitioners.
Hudson NodeJS Plugin
If you’re a NodeJS user who happens to use Hudson as a continuous integration server, then perhaps you would be interested to check out NodeJS Plugin which I released about a month ago (yea, I’m always behind with blogging).
This plugin allows you to use NodeJS script on a build step, as an alternative to the existing shell script (out of the box) and Ruby script (via a plugin).
Call me too optimistic, but I’m waiting for the day when all standard shell script commands have their NodeJS equivalence.
Projects: iphoneography melbourne shakeitmelbourne
by Cliffano Subagio
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Platform Home
My first go at iPhoneography, edited using ShakeItPhoto app.
This photo was taken at Clayton station platform 2, I was on my way home after work.
JSGames Plugin – Play Mario Kart & Tetris On Hudson
Now you can play games on Hudson using JSGames Plugin, albeit only a cutdown version of Mario Kart and Tetris (credit goes to Jacob Seidelin of Nihilogic Games). This plugin is extensible enough, so it’s pretty easy to add new games. The winners of 10K Apart would be good additions given the right license.
I wrote this plugin as an experiment on using Hudson for non-continuous integration purposes, in this case, a very minimalistic ‘games delivery platform’. Games as plugins, each with a pluggable Hudson UI that automatically adds a game menu / navigation. To push this further, the dashboard can then be modified to look more like Steam or iTunes, but of course I didn’t do this part.
Hudson is quite flexible, eh?