Penny Trickle | My AWS Cost Reduction

I almost had to reduce my beer budget, but then, I remembered all the news about AWS optimization and how Amazon is helping customers save cost. With a closer look at available options, I was able to reduce my cost of using AWS for webhosting by ~92%.

The cost of cloud computing can easily add up. A few cents here and there adds up to paying tens, hundreds or even thousands of dollars at scale. In my case I wanted to host a simple portfolio website. Nothing fancy, just some static portfolio website.

AWS has options

One of the best things about using AWS is the many available service options and customizability of services. In many ways, I think of AWS as the swiss army knife of cloud computing. For web hosting, there is AWS Lightsail, AWS Amplify, S3 and EC2. Depending on the type of website, whether a simple web application, or a complex web application with a lot of dynamic data, one or more of these AWS options will be best suited for the project. Modern websites or web applications can be distinctly categorized based on multiple attributes. A good question to start with is, "Is my website static or dynamic?".

In my case, I have a static website. However, I didn't consider all available options before deploying on AWS. An expensive oversight! Let's blame it on my "Just Do It" attitude which on occasion has proven to be a double edged sword. I just did it. I identified the easiest service I understood, AWS EC2, wrapped it up in a secondary service, AWS Elastic Beanstalk and voila there goes my website.

The Penny Trickle

My daily cost for hosting a website in a dedicated EC2 instance with Elastic Beanstalk configurations, was $0.71. Hold up... I'm not complaining about $0.71, I'm a frugal engineer but not to that level. Now take $0.71 and multiply by 30 for my monthly cost, that is $21.30. I'm not done yet, multiply that by 12 and you have $255.60. For some context and why I blew a fuse after analyzing my AWS yearly cost, this costs more than an Amazon Prime subscription!

$255.60 is equivalent to a year of Netflix Premium subscription. It is more than my Amazon Prime subscription! $255.60 is an excellent meal for 2 on a good date. I can get spotify for 1 year and have some change left.

Yet, I spent $255.60 each year for 2 years on simple static website that nobody (except me) probably cares about. Adding to the penny trickle, I also had to pay monthly AWS Route 53 cost of $0.50, for the website's domain health checks and ~$13.00 yearly for domain name renewal. In total my yearly cost for hosting my website was $274.60. That is a good number of beers!! Yikes, I forgot about the cost with occasional updates, which adds on $1 or 2 everytime!

Switching Services -- Hold My Beer

With the economy this tough, everybody is looking to cut costs. I like having a portfolio website but dammit a man can't just cut beer allowance. I analyzed my cost, listed the features I liked about my current service and went hunting. It didn't take too long to settle on AWS Amplify. AWS Amplify has everything I liked,

  1. Auto updates from a Github repo.
  2. Easy integration with AWS Route 53.
  3. Pretty dashboard with health status.
  4. Customizable settings with YAML.
  5. Email notifications on build fails.

The list goes on! The best part is, it costs me pennies for the occasional website updates, and my daily cost for AWS Amplify is ~$0.00. I see the occasional $0.01 every couple of days. Alright here's the gotcha, I know AWS sometimes offers these 12-month free tier which sneaks up like an unwanted subscription. However, from my research so far, my Amplify usage is actually billed that cheap and I am not operating in free tier mode.