I've got a web application that's currently using a load-balanced RDS database with about 20GB of data. I've noticed that my first monthly bill is higher than expected, and I'm looking for tips on how to minimize costs.
Specifically, I'm being charged $0.0225 per load balancer hour and I'm uncertain about how to reduce this. Over 12 days, the bill showed 617 hours of usage – that doesn't seem right! I suspect it's due to an old environment I forgot to shut down.
Additionally, I'm seeing charges of $0.005 per public IPv4 address hour. This one seems excessive; AWS says I've used 2,098 hours which implies I've got seven IPv4 addresses. I'd like to reduce this without breaking anything.
I also have some other expenses: $0.0104 per t3.micro EC2 instance hour, $0.08 per GB-month for gp3 storage, and $0.016 per hour for a db.t4g.micro instance running PostgreSQL. The billing for both RDS provisional storage and EBS provisional storage has me a bit confused.
Can anyone suggest strategies for cutting down the number of IPv4 addresses or recommend a more cost-effective hosting solution than AWS? I'm still learning the ropes, so any advice would be greatly appreciated!
1 Answer
You might want to reconsider why you're using a load balancer in front of your RDS cluster. Each load balancer typically requires one IP address per Availability Zone, so if yours is distributed across multiple zones, that could explain the increased public IP addresses. If possible, try to keep your RDS cluster within the same VPC and avoid internet exposure altogether. This could save costs and enhance security as well!
Thanks for the tips! I initially set up the load balancer for ease of SSL certificate management. My traffic is low, so I might not need the load balancer at all. Would it make sense to drop down from three availability zones to just one instead?