> AWS would be cheaper with reserved instances, but then (IIRC) you're prepaying in advance for something you may not need. Even if it's cheaper, it's sort of d

> AWS would be cheaper with reserved instances, but then (IIRC) you're prepaying in advance for something you may not need. Even if it's cheaper, it's sort of defeating the purpose of "i can scale on demand". (which, yes you can still do, but you're back to 'on demand' pricing). That's why you mix. We know our base needs, these are reserved instances 100% utilization. When something comes up that drives a lot of traffic the on demand instances kick in automatically. If you have somewhat "regular" spikey traffic you can buy reserved instances with less utilization and still save vs raw on-demand pricing. I'll be the first to say we could do this all cheaper with some other VPS and a bunch more labor, but we are using a _ton_ of AWS services. My personal/moonlighting customers I use DO where a single nginx/sql droplet can handle everything with ease for small load sites