Amazon EC2 hosting,

[Nadav Har'El]

On Sun, Oct 10, 2010, Ori Idan wrote about "Re: Amazon EC2 hosting,":
> I am considering using EC2 for a web application.
> I am not sure how to calculate the payment per month.
> Do I pay only for the time someone makes a request?
> For example, I have a user who requests a certain report and it takes 1
> second to load the report request form, then 20 seconds to produce the
> report and print it.
> I understand that I pay for 21 seconds?

Of course not. You pay for a "virtual machine", which like a real machine
you don't customarily turn off, and then boot for 21 seconds.

Rather, if the price is 2 cents per hour (the price someone else quoted -
I didn't check) then each hour your server is "up" costs you 2 cents -
regardless of whether it handled requests from 1000 people, or nobody.
If you know when your clients will contact you, you can only turn the
server up at that time, but this is quite unlikely in a typical Web setting.
Rather, you'd normally have your virtual server up all the time, costing you -
if the cost is 2 cents an hour - $14 for the whole month.

When you start having more and more clients, and you need more than one
virtual machine to handle the load, then you can start playing with the number
of machines. For example, in low-load hours you have just one virtual machine
up, but in the peak hour you can have 3, and when you're slashdotted, you
can jump to 30. This allows you to only pay for as many machines as you really
need at each point, and not for an anticipated peak load. However, there's
still a minimum - Amazon's weakest machine offering. Unfortunately, they don't
sell you a Commodore-64-strength-server [1] for 1 cent a month.

[1] http://www.c64web.com/

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Nadav Har'El                        |      Sunday, Oct 10 2010, 2 Heshvan 5771
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