Financially Viable?
Recently, and probably unsurprisingly, I've been playing with
Amazon EC2 and in particular the
Ubuntu Server beta. So far I've been thoroughly impressed with its flexibility and power - especially the new management interface - although I've not really explored beyond short lived test instances. I did wonder about migrating this server over to a long running instance, but my back-of-a-napkin calculations showed that I would be spending at least four times what I am currently paying for my
Linode. Now Dustin Kirkland has made that job much easier using his
ec2-cost utility in screen-profiles (use the
PPA if you're not on Jaunty). It can be used with screen-profiles, or used directly:
$ /usr/share/screen-profiles/bin/ec2-cost --detail
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Estimated cost in Amazon's EC2 since last reboot
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Network sent: 0.420872 GB @ $0.10/GB
Network recv: 0.327810 GB @ $0.17/GB
Network cost: 0.104329
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Uptime: 141 hr @ $0.400000/hr
Uptime cost: $56.400000
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Total cost: ~$56.50
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Hmm - $56.50 for 141 hours? Doesn't really compare to $19.95 for ~720 hours (+ lots of transfer) in an average month, but it won't stop me from using for short tasks/tests.
How much would you have spent? Just for clarification, I know comparing EC2 to traditional hosting is akin to apples and oranges - I had no intention of moving my own server over after my napkin calculations, but I just wanted to share Dustin's useful script.