Michel Deby's picture

Hello,

I have let a small instance running for 2 months now, only with Magento installed and with no traffic.

I have noticed Amazon is billing around 600 hours for the item "Amazon EC2 running TurnKey Linux on EC2", that makes about $60/month/instance.

Is it normal ?

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Jeremy Davis's picture

Amazon's pricing page is here.

Small instance: $0.085/hr x 600hrs = $51.00
                                   +  $5.10    (10% TKL surcharge)
                                   = $56.10
Michel Deby's picture

Then it is about the same price as a dedicated server.

I thought that a "cloud instance" was waked up only when the website is visited.

If no, then I don't see the financial advantage of all that.

 

 
Eric Schrauth's picture

Does that "Same Price" include hardware/personnel support costs?

Jeremy Davis's picture

I haven't heard of anywhere/anything that does what you are talking about but it'd be nice!

There isn't a financial advantage to running a simple website from AWS IMO.

Openg's picture

If you are running Magento and have few visits why not fire up a micro instance, if you sign up as a new user you get that for free.

You have to be a little canny to get the most out of amazon, they certainly aren't in the 'open source doing it for love' end of the spectrum. 

Jeremy Davis's picture

Unfortunately TKL does not currently support micro instances.

Michel Deby's picture

Ok, now I understand, thank-you Jeremy.

I installed Magento via TKL and paid 50$/month or so.

Is it planned to have Magento/TKL on micro instances or are there technical limitations ?

 

 
Jeremy Davis's picture

But the devs have it on their to do list. If it's something you'd really like, vote on the poll and push it up the devs priority list.

Liraz Siri's picture

We've currently developing support for EBS backed instances (which will allow micro instances + the AWS free tier). The development version of the Hub already has a prototype of this running, but it may take a week or two longer until we finish testing and the production version of the Hub is updated. Hang in there!
Jeremy Davis's picture

Although if you use more than 10gb data then you'll have to pay extra.

Generally AWS charge by the hour but the free account comes with enough free hours that you could run one instance 24/7 for a full year. Alternatively you could run 2 instances 12 hrs a day for a year (or 4 instances 6 hrs a day - you get the drift). After your initial free year I'm not sure how much it is. I suggest you check their pricing directly.

To clarify: Amazon currently offer a "Free Tier" for new customers for their first 12 mths - full details on their pricing page.

Jeremy Davis's picture

Not sure if that link worked or not because what I saw looked pretty huge (High-Memory Quadruple Extra Large Instance)! Which unfortunately won't work with TKL ATM. Have a look at the specs here. Until TKL is available in 64 bits (currently 32 bits only) you have somewhat limited options: Micro, Small or (High-CPU) Medium Instance.

The free tier only applies to Micro instances. As for having multiple free accounts theoretically it's probably possible but I would imagine that it would be against their T&C and I suspect that you would run the risk of having your account(s) cancelled (you'd need to read their T&C to be sure).

Also at some point TKL will be introducing some additional cost for using TKL images (they haven't decided yet, it is currently free). See the blog post here to see exactly what the devs have stated.

To clarify your needs vs pricing I suggest that you contact Amazon directly and/or discuss it directly with the TKL core devs (Alon and Liraz).

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