Amazon EC2 Running costs after 1 full month - 52 USD 

Sean Cull  13 May 2010 20:01:12

I have been running a Domino server in EC2 for a couple of months now and thought I would do a post about the costs. I wrote up the scheme here. Note that this is a Domino server built from scratch and not the new Domino development image. The server is based in Ireland.

The server is pretty small scale being used for the FoCul Web sites, this blog, as a development server and as a hub between 4 other servers. If anyone has any particular usage metrics they would like to see I would be happy to oblige. I have posted a screenshot of the usage view from log.nsf as a simple comparison. TLogging / DAOS is not being used.

The main point to note is that I am using a spot instance. This is less than 50% of the cost of a regular instance. As I mentioned before I am a little confused by this scheme as you are currently only able to bid up to USD 0.045 which is well below the usual USD 0.095 price. I am a little uncomfortable that I could be cut off by a price spike but the last spike was valentines day.

Using the spot instance is saving USD 484 per annum - possibly a bit less as I would probably switch to the standard rate at busy times. The prices I am achieving are similar to those from a reserved instance without paying the USD 227 pa or USD 116 pa over 3 years fixed fee - see EC2 pricing. On first inspection it would appear that VAT cannot be recovered on these costs. The costs include 2 backup snapshots of the 60Gb data drive. The scheme used means that for a true "development server" you can stop and start the instance at will with no loss of data. Starting the server easily takes less than 5 minutes.

In terms of the perfomance I have been pretty happy. Here is an example of a well populated wiki => CAM2 Project. Sometimes there is a short delay while Xpage apps load but once they are going they are fine.

I have taken out the Amazon Cloudwatch partial month and a little bit of S3. The Cloudwatch in its simplest form is not worth paying for.





At these kinds of costs the server is comparable with the cheapest physical servers I have seen ( GBP 80 2.33 Ghz 2 GB ) versus EC2 1.2 Ghz 1.7GB although if the server were being used to host systems under under an SLA you would really need to use the reserved instance pricing ( and annual fee ) to make sure that a price spike did not take your server down.

Overall I am very pleased with the whole setup. The flexibility and scalability of the EC2 system are much better than anything I have seen before.

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