Some quick tips: If you use OpsWorks you can have time-based instances. We use this in our staging environment so it is only online when we're at work. We use

Some quick tips: If you use OpsWorks you can have time-based instances. We use this in our staging environment so it is only online when we're at work. We used to overestimate how large instances we needed. Our servers usually run just fine on micro-instances. We self host JIRA, Jenkins, our own backoffice and other stuff on a small instance. The memory is not enough out of the box so we use swap space instead which is fine for our own services. Hosting static websites on S3 + CloudFront is really cheap. Hope some of this applies to your situation. EDIT: Guess I'm not a heavy AWS user :) Hope someone replies with more relevant comments.