http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/servers/
http://4sysops.com/archives/amazon-ec2-pricing-for-dummies-part-1-only-pay-for-what-you-use/
"Basically, there are four major factors to remember when it comes to EC2 price calculation: S3 storage, EBS storage, EC2 bandwidth, and EC2 instance type. In my case, the storage costs are negligible ($2), the bandwidth costs are significant ($15) and the EC2 instance costs are decisive ($82). "
cloud rate calculator
- In general, one database = one instance. You spin up instances, and do what you like with them. Definitely possible to have more connections to it.
- Hours per month is just that. How many hours per month you have the instance active. If you plan to have the instance active 24/7, you may find more cost effective alternatives with other cloud providers. If you run it less often than that, you save money when it's not active. It's billed hourly to your account at the rate specified.
- Upload data is counted at the standard transfer rates. A few GBs doesn't cost much, but you will be paying for the service starting the moment you spin up the instance.
Database Service Pricing http://aws.amazon.com/rds/pricing/
http://bitnami.com/cloud-cost-calculator
There are a lot of nice UI calculators (newvem, trusted advisor, ylastic, etc) that will do it for you. Personally I developed one for myself (it is free for everybody) and use it to analyze AWS accounts of my clients to generate a cost report for various AWS services (EC2, RDS, EBS, ELB, S3, etc...).
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/158765/amazon-ec2-cost
Rackspace delivers a better service that Amazon AWS at a fraction of the cost. A basic Rackspace Cloud Server (dedicated only to you) costs around $11/mo and their customer service is astoundingly good. (For example, you can actually TALK to someone via phone or live chat, instead of having to post in community support forums. With amazon you have to subscribe to an annual service contract in order to talk to anyone, which costs around $250/year)
As of 2012, this answer is mostly incorrect. Both Rackspace and Amazon EC2 give you a virtual machine; so on both services you are sharing the physical hardware. For small deployments, Amazon is much cheaper than Rackspace because Amazon is FREE for the first year using micro instances. Even after that, for hosting a web server Amazon is still cheaper when you avail yourself of reserved instances/spot instances. Rackspace does have a more compelling support offering,
Although AWS seems to be inexpensive at the begining, but in reality it is very expensive.
After using AWS for some time, I discovered it is actually very expensive, you better rent one or more dedicated servers. which will give you more processing power and will cost much less.AWS costs will shoot in the sky if your website gets many visitors, serve many files and requests... these small tiny fractions that they charge sum up. Examples: last month I used AWS, I paid 10$ just for requests into S3, which means they count how many requests you made and sum them up and charge you for this... but you still have to pay for the actual bandwidth of these requests! which sounds crazy for me.. why do I have to pay for the requests if I already pay for bandwidth used & for storage costs?you also have to pay for IO requests! which means everytime you read from or write to the hard drive you they are adding up small fractions!these small fractions may look very small, but if your website is very busy, you will be surprised at the end of the monthCosts: instance + traffic /from/to instance + hard drive + requests to hard drive + S3 storage + S3 bandwidth + S3 requeststhe best thing to do is to use S3 as a storage, and server your files from your own servers.. this way you have to pay for storage and your requests + bandwith usage will be minimal....
After using AWS for some time, I discovered it is actually very expensive, you better rent one or more dedicated servers. which will give you more processing power and will cost much less.AWS costs will shoot in the sky if your website gets many visitors, serve many files and requests... these small tiny fractions that they charge sum up. Examples: last month I used AWS, I paid 10$ just for requests into S3, which means they count how many requests you made and sum them up and charge you for this... but you still have to pay for the actual bandwidth of these requests! which sounds crazy for me.. why do I have to pay for the requests if I already pay for bandwidth used & for storage costs?you also have to pay for IO requests! which means everytime you read from or write to the hard drive you they are adding up small fractions!these small fractions may look very small, but if your website is very busy, you will be surprised at the end of the monthCosts: instance + traffic /from/to instance + hard drive + requests to hard drive + S3 storage + S3 bandwidth + S3 requeststhe best thing to do is to use S3 as a storage, and server your files from your own servers.. this way you have to pay for storage and your requests + bandwith usage will be minimal....
If you are running a server 24x7 then buy reserved instances. For example a reserved instance of Linux small instance running 24x7 for 3 years will cost a total of $572.36. $257 for purchased of reserved instance then $8.64 per month until the 3 years runs out. An on-demand instance would cost you $43 per month, so reserved is more cost effective for 24x7 machines. (remember, this is a machine you have full control - run many websites - over like a personal box)
If you are doing dev tests, then use a Spot Instance or on-demand. An amazon Linux spot instance is 0.007 per hour right now. An on-demand instance is 0.06 per hour. A spot instance dies when it is turned off, an on-demand can be stopped and started. Spot instances are used by people who need to do short term work like web crawling or census data junk that lasts for a short time.
It costs almost nothing to play around with AWS so you get an idea of the costs. It costs me less than a dollar to play around for 3 days during work hours. I created on-demand machines, I created spot instances and ran them all night, I spent about 12 hours total. Its cheap to learn. You will learn more experimenting than you will asking questions in forums.