Sure, going to $50 won't matter to most wallets, but at around $100 you're just getting ripped off and someone is having a laugh at your expense.
So I'd put 'paying a fortune' at around $100/month for his case.
This comes up on every AWS-related comment section.
$100/month for something I could do with VPS is an amazing bargain if it saves me even 2 hours of dev time every month.
As someone who used to maintain servers and databases first on dedicated hardware, then on colo servers, and later on vanilla EC2, I am so thankful for RDS. It's absolutely amazing not to have to worry about:
- failover
- scaling
- logs
- read(/write) replicas
- (restoring) backups
- monitoring
- maintenance windows
- minor version updates
- OS updates
...and that's probably not even a complete list.
Every VPS-like database management experience I've ever had has caused me a lot of lost sleep. It's just not worth it. I can't imagine why anyone would DIY this stuff if they're working with any kind of budget at all.
At the moment, I have an insurance company with hundreds of thousands of customers running on ~$1,000/mo. of AWS services. The modern cloud is amazing and a constant source of joy for someone like me, who has been doing web software for more than 20 years.
Also $100 for his case would be $1 per 60 monthly visitors. I hope they're not planning to be ad-supported, because then they will be leaking money at an amazing rate.
Plus what is the point of scaling when you're losing money at any scale?
I run a site with roughly 2 million monthly visitors. On AWS it would cost me $20,000/month on traffic alone.
Instead I run it on 4 dedicated servers and a bunch of VPS, costing me around $500/month all-in-all.
I could hire a four system administrators for the money I save, to look after each of my four dedicated servers full-time. How does AWS beat that?
Which VPS provider are you talking about specifically?
> Plus what is the point of scaling when you're losing money at any scale?
My point is that I'm not losing money. I'm saving money by transferring unpredictable salary costs into predictable server costs.
> I run a site with roughly 2 million monthly visitors. On AWS it would cost me $20,000/month on traffic alone.
If this is a static site, 2 million monthly visitors on AWS would cost less than $5.
If it's a non-static site and none of those 2 million visits are cached, I still can't begin to imagine what your app is doing that it could possibly cost you $20,000/month. That would buy you a huge fleet of servers (something like 200 mid-to-large EC2 instances).
It doesn't sound like you have a sense of what AWS costs, even within an order of magnitude.
> Instead I run it on 4 dedicated servers and a bunch of VPS, costing me around $500/month all-in-all.
Four medium EC2 instances also cost ~$500/month all-in, so you're seemingly saving nothing. The layers of software on top of the (virtual) hardware are free.
Based on your totals your numbers are suspect. You’re saying each visitor would cost you 100$ in bandwidth fees? At the lowest bandwidth pricing level that’s over a terabyte per user, per month, if you go through cloudfront.
