Thanks for the tip - I will investigate it. EC2 costs are by far the biggest cost in our monthly billing. Easily running up to 80% of the total monthly costs.

Thanks for the tip - I will investigate it. EC2 costs are by far the biggest cost in our monthly billing. Easily running up to 80% of the total monthly costs. The rest is split fairly equally between RDS, CloudFront, DynamoDB, Route53, S3, Glacier etc. Bandwidth itself is a pretty tiny proportion. But then again, we don't do things like transport big files around to/from clients etc. Most of our web apps are purely screen and transactional information. The biggest cost saving to us in the past few years was moving from on demand instance pricing to reserved instance pricing. Easily knocked our monthly bill down by more than half. The tricky thing about reserved instances though (at least up to now), was trying to predict what sort of capacity you would need for the next 12 months or so. We did inadvertently spend too much sometimes on 'wrong' sized reserved instances, and basically threw money away because we ended up paying out months on instances that we could not immediately use. Once we get better at crystal ball gazing, we will probably move to 36 month advance purchase of instances to save even more money. Oh - one thing that tricked us too - it is not readily apparent on the Amazon Console Reserve Instance purchase screen which instance types work within a VPC and which don't. We ended up reserving a few instance types that we eventually found out we could not use within our defined VPC, which was a shame, though not a deal killer as we could use their "ClassicLink" feature to work around it. Just a tip for any Amazon team member who may be reading.