: How can I calculate the maximum cost of an instance or prevent clients from exceeding pre-paid limits? I am considering moving various VPS servers I mange on behalf of clients to AWS (EC2).

@Jessie594

The major cloud service providers use different pricing models. You could consider at least checking out the big 3: Amazon, Microsoft and Google. Of them all, I think Amazon has the most confusing pricing structure. A lot of that is due to the wide variety of cloud products they offer. You can look at this pricing 101 post to get an idea of AWS storage costs.

Google has been expanding their cloud services. As part of that they offer a wide range of discounts, including sustained usage (longer you use the more the discount) and committed use, where you could set the CPU and RAM per month, with unlimited VM's, for more stable pricing. And they have reserved instance discounts, too. I read this article which has good comparisons and some guidance on which provider is better for what. Plus, in that link there is a cost calculator for AWS and Google.

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@Nimeshi995

You should reconsider your requirements. Reserved instances on AWS are better suited for continuous operation of websites. I guess you are trying to minimize the costs of managing traffic spikes without opting for the larger instances all the time. Amazon also offers automatic load balancing. If you want to micro manage switching between instances and stopping unnecessary ones, you will have to use orchestration tools such as Kubernetes. Amazon provides a Simple Monthly Calculator and calculates rough estimates based on all products you wish to use including details like the expected utilisation and bandwidth.

If you don't want to do that yourself, companies like Heroku offer fixed pricing and operate on top of Amazon AWS. They manage everything for you (at a price) and and let you scale your websites on demand.

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