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.
last October, but they recently announced that it was now available on 
stores. This time the album was £4.99 or 69p per track.