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> I use AWS EC2 for Waitlist's backend python webserver, RDS for the postgres database, S3 for file storage, and an Elastic IP. I use T2 and T3 instances. My AW
by ZephyrBlu 3y ago
> I use AWS EC2 for Waitlist's backend python webserver, RDS for the postgres database, S3 for file storage, and an Elastic IP. I use T2 and T3 instances. My AWS bill would be $200-300 a month
Seems like a high bill for what sounds like basically a hosted email list? I would have expected compute and storage costs to be very low.
E: This was NOT a point about how cloud costs are ridiculous. Even for cloud this seems high.
- waitlist 3y agoWe're much more than a hosted email list. We field over a million requests on a normal day.
- ZephyrBlu 3y agoI'm not sure what you're trying to say? I have no idea what your 1M requests are doing. They could be 1M requests for static HTML. It does make the monthly costs seem a bit more understandable, but 1M/24hrs is still only ~12 RPS. Btw my comment wasn't an insult, "hosted email list" genuinely seems like the primary functionality and I wouldn't have expected it to use many resources.
- wongarsu 3y ago> except it's free because I got $5,000 in credits from AWS Activate Free credits are the ingenious marketing ploy of all big clouds to delay price comparisons until some amount of lock-in is achieved. Sure, you could likely host it for 1/10th to 1/5th of the cost elsewhere. But then you would have to pay from the get-go, and on AWS it's free™ (until it isn't)
- ZephyrBlu 3y agoI meant that even for hosting in the cloud it seems high. I have a hard time understanding where the cost is coming from. I can only assume it's because of the DB as opposed to the instance or S3. I wouldn't be surprised if it was over 10x cheaper if you didn't use cloud hosting.
- iot_devs 3y agoDatabase costs are very high. I am not sure I know the reason behind it honestly. Either you go with something like Dynamodb or planetscale or the least you pay is 40€/m using AWS Aurora serverless. As soon as databases start to charge for computing time the cost balloon out of reach of hobby projects.
- RhodesianHunter 3y agoBecause the alternative, self hosting, is labor intensive and requires experience.
- wongarsu 3y agoRDS is very expensive. Just following the console's advise for production instances (meaning Multi-AZ with a Proxy), a t3-medium (2 vCPU, 4GB) Postgres instance with 5GB storage is $130/month. You can get it down to $12/month by going with a t4g.micro (2 vCPU, 1GB RAM), single-az, no proxy, no backups, 5GB storage; with price after that scaling roughly linearly with RAM. But the interface will scream at you the entire time that this isn't reasonable for a production setup.
- ZephyrBlu 3y agoAh, it makes sense why costs would be high in that case. Multi-AZ + proxy seems like massive overkill for 99% of applications though.
- jwdunne 3y agoWe thought that at the SaaS I’m working at but AWS scheduled maintenance in our AZ and that led to significant downtime with nothing we could do about it, no compensation, nada. It was basically our fault because we didn’t use multi-AZ. I can’t remember if this was RDS or ECS but we figured if it could happen to one critical service in a single AZ, it could happen to another. I think Proxy _is_ overkill and perhaps expensive for what it is. For a pg install, running pgBouncer isn’t difficult. But I guess that depends on whether you’re authenticating with IAMs, which doesn’t sound trivial with bouncer (it might be).
- intelVISA 3y agoWelcome to the cloud dystopia.
- cutler 3y agoI'm so thankful my career as a developer and sysadmin preceded the cloud era. We now have a whole generation who manage cloud infrastructure but have never setup a Linux server from scratch.
- rajamaka 3y agoI've gone through both eras and hope I never have to configure a switch or see a HP iLO ever again. Cloud ftw, imo.
- gnz11 3y agoThey could be over-provisioned. AWS does provide recommendations if you are though.
- SilkRoadie 3y agoI am sure there are numerous services costing $5-10/mo that would cover this and I would certainly consider that to eliminate the hosting and maintenance cost. If I had to build it, I would expect using Lambda, DynamoDb and S3 would likely bring the hosting cost to down to a couple of a dollars a month max.
- XCSme 3y agoWell, it is high, when everything could be run on a $5 VPS with higher availability, less complexity, faster backups and simpler deploys.