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.
Slicehosted
I moved my site hosting to Slicehost about 6 months ago, and I only have praises about their service. What I like the most about Slicehost is the fact that they give a sense of community with their wiki, forum, and chatroom. Gone are the days when I had to wait for at least a day to get a reply to my queries (think Go Daddy).
There are so many testimonials about how great Slicehost is, so I’m just going to write my Sliceperiences here…
- I messed up one of my startup scripts and accidentally locked myself out of Ubuntu. I logged in to Slicehost chatroom and 30 seconds later a Slicehost staff told me about Slicehost Ajax console. So not only I got a quick answer, I also found out that the console meant I would never get locked out of my VPS.
- Slicehost sent a notification email telling me that my server had been using its swap space consistently after a day of running. This helped me identify something fundamentally wrong with pagination usage in my Rails app, as exampled on Agile Web Development with Rails book. Without the email, I wouldn’t have noticed the memory usage issue that early (the app wasn’t that important to be memory-profiled beforehand).
- One thing that initially led me to Slicehost was my plan to use Google Apps to handle email for my domain. While my previous web host ignored my query re Google Apps usage, setting it up on Slicehost was as easy as modifying some settings on SliceManager with instruction readily available from the forum.
The only downside with moving to the new host is that I couldn’t run Tomcat with several Java webapps with just 256mb (I’m not prepared to fork out more than US$20/month), it’s just not enough. Hence I changed this blog to use WordPress, and rewrote Wish to use Rails with Mongrel, all to squeeze down memory footprint.
All in all, I’m looking forward to using Slicehost for years to come, and to recommend their service to those who look for VPS hosting.