I'm curious about the monthly costs of running an EC2 instance. I currently have a t3.medium instance running SQL Server in Docker for a .NET application, but I'm not getting any requests right now. However, I'm seeing costs of about $3-4 per day, which adds up quickly for a small business. I've tried implementing some rate limiting through Nginx, but the changes haven't been significant. Are there better ways to optimize costs? Also, I've noticed that other AWS managed services can be more expensive than managing things manually.
5 Answers
You mentioned it costs about $3-4 daily, which comes to about $90-$120 monthly. Keep in mind, you're paying for the instance being up, regardless of traffic.
I'm confused about how you're getting such high costs for a t3.medium. It should only be around $1 per day, plus some for outbound traffic. Have you checked the Cost Explorer? There might be something else going on to drive those costs up.
If your traffic is really low, why not switch to Lambda and use a different storage solution like SQLite instead? That way, you could save quite a bit!
EC2 instances charge you based on their uptime, not the amount of requests they receive. A t3.medium costs around $0.044 per hour, which adds up to roughly $32 per month. So even if you don’t have any traffic, as long as the instance is running, you’ll be paying for it. Plus, consider other charges like data transfer and any additional resources like public IPs or Load Balancers that increase costs. You might want to check with tools like Gemini or Cost Explorer to break down your expenses.
It sounds like the bulk of your costs is from the EC2 server and its storage. You can see this clearly in AWS Cost Explorer. Rate limiting won’t really help your situation if that's the main source of your expense. You might want to consider switching to a smaller instance type to save some money.
True, but doesn't Lambda have a cold start issue?