Recently, and probably unsurprisingly, I’ve been playing with Amazon EC2 and in particular the Ubuntu Server beta. So far I’ve been thoroughly impressed with its flexibility and power – especially the new management interface – although I’ve not really explored beyond short lived test instances. I did wonder about migrating this server over to a long running instance, but my back-of-a-napkin calculations showed that I would be spending at least four times what I am currently paying for my Linode.
Now Dustin Kirkland has made that job much easier using his ec2-cost utility in screen-profiles (use the PPA if you’re not on Jaunty). It can be used with screen-profiles, or used directly:
$ /usr/share/screen-profiles/bin/ec2-cost --detail ================================================ Estimated cost in Amazon's EC2 since last reboot ================================================ Network sent: 0.420872 GB @ $0.10/GB Network recv: 0.327810 GB @ $0.17/GB Network cost: 0.104329 ------------------------------------------------ Uptime: 141 hr @ $0.400000/hr Uptime cost: $56.400000 ------------------------------------------------ Total cost: ~$56.50 ================================================
Hmm – $56.50 for 141 hours? Doesn’t really compare to $19.95 for ~720 hours (+ lots of transfer) in an average month, but it won’t stop me from using for short tasks/tests.
How much would you have spent?
Just for clarification, I know comparing EC2 to traditional hosting is akin to apples and oranges – I had no intention of moving my own server over after my napkin calculations, but I just wanted to share Dustin’s useful script.
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Tags: amazon, ec2, screen, screen-profiles, Ubuntu
You can’t compare an EC2 offering to a Linode directly. In Linode, you probably use it for hosting your site. If you do that in EC2, you’ll incur a cost because you are billed per hour, most especially if you are using the Large and X-Large images.
Also let’s say you did make your web application in Linode, the question is, how can you do a parallel scale of that in a straightforward manner like what you can do in EC2?
@Jerome G.: Linode offers all the tools you need to scale and at a much lower price point.
> Uptime: 141 hr @ $0.400000/hr
You pick a large instance (0.4/hr). The small instance is cheaper (0.1/hr).
Large instance : “Large Instance 7.5 GB of memory, 4 EC2 Compute Units (2 virtual cores with 2 EC2 Compute Units each), 850 GB of instance storage, 64-bit platform”
Do you really need 7,5 GB of memory ?
The script made that decision (based on the number of processors available to my Linode), not me. Good catch though, and if I went with a small instance (which my napkin calculations were based on) my bill (right now) would be $19.46 instead of $77.20 – a heck of a difference.