Kinda sorta, yes. You can commit to using that instance for 1 or 3 years and prepay for a discount... $164 per month if you reserve for a year, $126 per month i

Kinda sorta, yes. You can commit to using that instance for 1 or 3 years and prepay for a discount... $164 per month if you reserve for a year, $126 per month if you reserve for 3 years. Really you also need to factor in the data transfer fees, and the storage and IO fees of a RAID array of EBS disks. Last time I used EC2 to run a large database, the IO fees for EBS were almost as much as the EC2 fees... so take your estimate for the instance and double it. The real cost of running an active Mongo instance on one EC2 instance with a 2-disk EBS RAID might be closer to $400 per month than $245. EC2 is not price-competitive if you don't need to be able to launch and terminate instances on the fly on a regular basis. For small deployments, get a VPS, for larger ones, dedicated servers. I used to run most of my sites on Amazon services. I later moved (back) to renting servers from Softlayer. I was maxing out most of my servers at both providers -- I don't have extra money to blow on capacity before I need it. For every ~$350 EC2+EBS+Transfer instance at Amazon, I only need a ~$160 physical server now.