Title: Amazon EC2 pricing Post by: kode54 on March 11, 2013, 01:07:53 AM As mentioned in this topic (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=130533.0) regarding setting up Amazon EC2 instances for Electrum servers, I see mentioned that the cost of running such a m1.small instance should only cost about $6.84 per month to run. I currently run an m1.small instance with a single 32GB volume, and it costs about $11 per month, and only because I paid $199 up front for a reserved instance. How is the indicated pricing possible? Would running Amazon Linux actually cost extra? I thought that was one of the free AMIs.
Title: Re: Amazon EC2 pricing Post by: RokShox on March 11, 2013, 03:45:54 AM Aren't you also paying for that 32GB volume?
Title: Re: Amazon EC2 pricing Post by: 2112 on March 11, 2013, 04:24:20 AM You get hit by the per-i/o-operation charges on EBS volumes. Convert your system to use 160GB local disk available with the small instance and then the charges will be much lower. Also make sure you use the "Instance store" version not the "EBS-Backed" version.
Title: Re: Amazon EC2 pricing Post by: kode54 on March 11, 2013, 06:02:04 PM I wasn't aware that the EBS I/O factored into the hourly charge for the instance. According to the instance information, it's costing me $0.016 per hour, which comes out to $11.56 for 30 solid days of run time. Or is that rate simply higher because I'm running an EBS backed instance?
I'm running my IRC client and log storage out of this instance, and while it would be nice to be able to have more room which is cheaper, what happens if my instance is ever stopped, or needs to reboot? I thought the whole point of EBS backed instances was that the data storage was more permanent. Title: Re: Amazon EC2 pricing Post by: 2112 on March 11, 2013, 07:30:06 PM I'm running my IRC client and log storage out of this instance, and while it would be nice to be able to have more room which is cheaper, what happens if my instance is ever stopped, or needs to reboot? I thought the whole point of EBS backed instances was that the data storage was more permanent. Reboot doesn't erase the ephemeral disks. Stopping (by you or by Amazon due to hardware failure) erases the ephemeral disks.I see no point of storing blockchain and IRC logs on EBS. You pay both for space (per GB) and accessing it (per I/O). Blockchain is easily replaceable, store it on a local disk where both space and i/o are included in the price of the instance. IRC logs should be compressed and stored in a way that makes them hard to accidently erase or alter. So store them in Amazon S3 or RRS or Glacier. Basically you'll need to set up a sensible backup schedule for your instance. Use the ec2-make-ami as a backup until you'll learn how to properly operate everything and make minimal backups. You can also have both local and EBS storage attached to your instance and size the EBS appropriately to the task, the smallest volume is only 1GB. You can have both combinations: boot from local disk and attach EBS or boot from EBS and attach local disk. But your first investment should be to read the available documentation, the pricing plans and the invoices you are getting. Title: Re: Amazon EC2 pricing Post by: kode54 on March 12, 2013, 07:01:18 PM Yeah, I suppose I could save money by learning how to migrate this mess over to an instance store backed instance. I still want to back up vital data though. (Yes, I consider my 16GB worth of IRC logs to be somewhat vital.)
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