Free Shipping by Amazon. AWS Scripted: How to Automate the Deployment of Secure and Resilient Websites with Amazon Web Services VPC, ELB, EC2, RDS, IAM, SES. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud. This course describes the fundamentals of this web service. Get introduced to the features of Amazon EC2, find out where it is available, and explore purchasing options based on instance preference: reserved, scheduled, spot, or dedicated. Accessing Amazon EC2. Amazon EC2 provides a web-based user interface, the Amazon EC2 console. If you've signed up for an AWS account, you can access the Amazon EC2 console by signing into the AWS Management Console and selecting EC2 from the console home page. How to make your own VPN using AWS EC2, OpenVPN, PuTTy, and WinSCP. 2019 / by Paul Bischoff How to make your own free VPN with Amazon Web Services May.
I noticed that Amazon has a free EC2 tier. I am very interested in trying it but am afraid to host my own site there. My head starts to spin when I see all of the ways they charge users (charges for bandwidth, disk space, # of hours of operation). I just want to run a drupal site and have ssh. I get less than 5,000 hits/month, but am growing often. I have no serious problems with my current site but am trying to save a little bit of cash.
I see posts like this and wonder if I will be stuck paying $10 or so a month any way. Can anyone confirm that free is really free? What are 'traps' that people fall into that ends up costing them money?
closed as primarily opinion-based by HopelessN00bApr 3 '15 at 18:08
Many good questions generate some degree of opinion based on expert experience, but answers to this question will tend to be almost entirely based on opinions, rather than facts, references, or specific expertise. If this question can be reworded to fit the rules in the help center, please edit the question.
locked by HopelessN00bApr 3 '15 at 18:08
This question exists because it has historical significance, but it is not considered a good, on-topic question for this site so please do not use it as evidence that you can ask similar questions here. This question and its answers are frozen and cannot be changed. See the help center for guidance on writing a good question.
Read more about locked posts here.
5 Answers
If you are just running a Drupal website, you will need an EC2 instance with EBS storage and an Elastic IP address (all EC2 instances have SSH access).The EC2 instance (t1.micro) will be free (for 1 year, if you are a new customer)
You get 10GB of EBS storage - the default Amazon Linux AMI has an 8GB root volume. I would recommend shrinking this down to about 4 GB and attaching a second 6GB volume to your instance (at least personally, I like to keep my data separate from the root volume). One area where you might incur costs are for I/O. Amazon's Linux AMI is quite efficient, but depending on your drupal setup and traffic, it would not be unexpected to exceed the 1M I/Os you get per month.
Ideally, you will use EBS snapshots for your backups, however, that is very dependent on the amount of data you have. This is one of the reasons I like to split the root volume from my data. It is very easy to exceed 1GB of snapshot storage, and it can be quite difficult to estimate your necessary snapshot space (the first snapshot will be around 50% of your used space (depending on how compressible your data is). Each subsequent snapshot will take much less, since it is a differential backup, but looks at changed blocks as opposed to changed files. Alternatively, you can take more traditional backups (tar.gz) and upload them to S3 (remember though, that generating those backups result in I/Os).
Your final cost will come from bandwidth - 15GB per month is included in the free tier. Determine your current bandwidth usage to see whether or not you will go over.
At any time you can view your current account activity on Amazon's site, so you can monitor if you are getting close to the threshold values. Unfortunately, there is no way of setting caps on resource usage on AWS - whatever you use you have to pay for.
I would recommend setting up an EC2 instance, but keeping your existing host operational to begin with. You can switch your DNS to point to your AWS Elastic IP and try it out, keeping an eye on your Account Activity. If you find that everything is well within an acceptable range, you can do away with your existing host, otherwise, it is a simple matter of reverting your DNS and rsyncing any changes to go back to your old host (remember to delete your snapshots, EBS volumes, and stop your instances otherwise you will continue to incur costs). AWS also provides 'reports' with hourly activity broken down by resource usage - they are a bit hard to read, but you should be able to make sense of them. They can help you to determine when and what might be causing your usage to to be higher than normal.
Just to recap: you should be able to predict bandwidth usage in advance - which means that I/O will be the main factor that is hard to predict (and snapshot usage if you opt to go that root).
cyberx86cyberx86We use EC2 free tier for a couple months, and so far it's really free, and we did nothing special to keep it free. Also you can check your account from time to time and see if you get close to limits, and you can always suspend or terminate your usage at any given moment to avoid unwanted charges.
Sandman4Sandman4
There is only one trap (that I know of)
There is no way to cap the bill, if you cross the free tier limit. Assume your site gets a DOS attack, you would cross the free tier limit easily and might end up paying a hefty bill just for the bandwidth.
Pothi KalimuthuPothi KalimuthuNo it is not free. You can see it stated on the Amazon website. It is free up to a certain quota. Over the quota it costs money.
mailqmailqAmazon Ec2 Free Forever
I agree that the truly unpredictable potential cost comes from your I/O to your EBS. Even with the increased allowance (2 million) I met this in just a couple of days. Luckily I caught it before it cost me too much, but I was surprised how quickly I got there. Granted I was using windows server 2012 and running some pretty intense tests to see what it could handle. Needless to say I was disappointed as it really isn't cost effective for me to test on.
Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged amazon-ec2 or ask your own question.
I am running a single instance t1.micro to host centos with an open source erp programNow I wish to also host another instance with a 2nd erp program. Will this be within my free tier limit.
Is there a count on the no# of instance I can use / start?
How many elastic Ip's can I associate?
saviour123closed as off-topic by Stephen Kennedy, Nick A, dur, tripleee, Michael DoddJun 3 at 12:50
- This question does not appear to be about programming within the scope defined in the help center.
5 Answers
Amazon Ec2 Free Account
For Question #1: Number of Instances
Amazon charges based on hours of usage, not based on number of instances you are running. Check this Amazon AWS Free tier details.
They have clearly mentioned that the free tier includes:
750 hours of Amazon EC2 Linux/UNIX or RHEL or SLES Micro Instance usage (613 MB of memory and 32-bit and 64-bit platform support) – enough hours to run continuously each month*
750 hours of Amazon EC2 Microsoft Windows Server‡ Micro Instance usage (613 MB of memory and 32-bit and 64-bit platform support) – enough hours to run continuously each month*
750 hours of an Elastic Load Balancer plus 15 GB data processing*
30 GB of Amazon Elastic Block Storage, plus 2 million I/Os and 1 GB of snapshot storage
For Question #2: Elastic IP addresses
Allocating and using one Elastic IP addresses per instance is basically free, except if the Elastic IP address is not currently associated with an instance, see section Elastic IP Addresses on page Amazon EC2 Pricing:
Dineshkumar PonnusamyDineshkumar PonnusamyAmazon has a handy page that details everything under their free tier here: http://aws.amazon.com/free/
A single Micro instance running for 744 hours is free of charge, means you will be able to spin up two micros for half that alotted time, or three for a third. As soon as you go above 744 hours of micro compute you will be charged the standard $0.02/hr pricing.
As for the Elastic IPs, you will not be charged for one unless:- The IP address is not attached to any running instance- You have attached an IP address to an instance that already has an internet-routable IP address
If you're really cost adverse you can set up another Amazon account, the free tier last for 12 months and the Credit Card you need to provide is allowed to be the same for the accounts. As an extra note it's a nice way to have a cheaper dev environment (and also separates the environment nicely to boot!) You can then look into combining invoices and sharing resources between accounts as well.
Amazon Free Echo With Amazon Music
As far as I know the free tier covers 750 machine hours of micro instances. You can probably run 750 machines for 1 hour and finish that quota in 1 hour.Or run 1 micro instance 24x7 and it will stay up for a whole month.
So you can only run one ec2 instance in the free tier.
Micro instances are not free if your free tier is up or you exceeded 750 micro instance hours per month.
Ankur MahajanAnkur MahajanIt says,
750 hours of Amazon EC2 Linux/UNIX or RHEL or SLES Micro Instance usage (613 MB of memory and 32-bit and 64-bit platform support)
To clarify, if you have 2 EC2 instances run 24/7, that will make them a total of 1,488 hours in 31 days (1 month)
If you don't want to pay an excess. Your 2 instances would only last around 15 days so it won't exceed 750 hours allocation per month.
Furthermore, this free tier expires in 12 month and only for new customers following your AWS sign-up date.
user3856437user3856437Please refer the below FAQ from AWS -
Does an AWS customer have access to 750 instance hours each of the Linux and Windows t2.micro instances under the AWS Free Usage Tier?
Yes. A customer with access to the AWS Free Usage Tier can use up to 750 instance hours each of t2.micro instances running Linux and Windows. Usage of the Linux and Windows t2.micro instances are counted independently.