Amazon Web Services

Some notes on Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Pricing

There are 4 models for Amazon Elastic Compute (EC2):

On-Demand Instances

Pay per hour or per second

Reserved

Discounted up to 75% compared to On-Demand but must commit to a 1 or 3 year term

Spot Instances

Request spare computing capacity by making a bid and having it fulfilled when the price drops below your bid

Dedicated Hosts

There are many different instance types. The 12 month free eligible type is t2.micro which comes with 1 vCPU, 1GB RAM, 15GB Outbound Bandwidth. The value of the t2.micro VM in US East (Ohio):

• $0.01 per hour * 720 hours/month ($7.20)
• $0.1 per GB/mo storage * 30 GB ($3)
• $0.09 per GB/mo bandwidth * 15 GB per month ($1.35 - $0.09 as 1st GB is free)

Prices for the t2 instances and EC2 in general can be found at:

• https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/t2/
• https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/on-demand/

CPU Credits

Burstable instances such as the t2 instances have CPU credits. VMs accumulate a certain amount of credit every hour, depending on the instance type and uses credits when consuming more CPU than some threshold.

Mail Server

Port 25 is throttled. To run a mail server, request the removal of sending limitations using the following form:

• https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/knowledge-center/ec2-port-25-throttle/

This is also the form used to set the reverse DNS, apparently.

Alternatives

Looking at just the pricing, AWS EC2 is actually very expensive for what you get. Others have mentioned alternatives including:

• Vultr
• DigitalOcean
• Linode
• OVH

If a VM to run some workload is all you need, some low end VPS packages from WHT offers are also valued very well.