I have a web application that's currently utilizing an RDS database with about 20GB of provisional data, and it's set up in a load-balanced environment. I've recently noticed my monthly costs are much higher than expected, so I'm looking for ways to cut down on these expenses.
For instance, I'm paying $0.0225 per hour for the load balancer, and over the past 12 days, I've been charged for 617 hours, which suggests I still have some old environments running. I'm also seeing $0.005 per hour for each public IPv4 address, and I suspect I have too many of them, as the billing indicates I've been charged for over 2000 hours across almost 12 days, implying I have seven addresses. Other charges include $0.0104 per hour for an EC2 instance, $0.08 per GB-month for EBS storage, and various RDS instance and storage fees.
I'm wondering what the best ways are to potentially reduce the number of IPv4 addresses I'm using or if there's a more cost-effective hosting platform than AWS I should consider. I'm relatively new to this, so any insights or advice would be greatly appreciated!
1 Answer
Consider if you truly need a load balancer for your RDS setup. Generally, a load balancer will increase your IP usage because it allocates an IP per Availability Zone. If you can keep everything within the same VPC, that could cut down on costs and help with security too. It's worth looking into!
Thanks for the advice! I initially set up a load balancer to simplify attaching my SSL certificate, but maybe it's overkill for my low traffic situation. Do you think scaling down from three availability zones to just one would help?