Amazon AWS Reviews and Pricing

Owner at a computer software company with 51-200 employees

Aug 24, 2013

Amazon EC2 monthly price tables for SaaS-relevant configurations, in euros

EC2 is Amazon’s cloud service for flexible use of virtual machines. One of the big advantages of this service is that Amazon’s hourly prices also include the cost for the Windows and/or SQL Server license. Amazon has just announced lower prices for Windows EC2 instances.

It’s not always easy to calculate total monthly costs for various configurations, so in this post I will try to give an indication of montly costs for configurations that would be relevant for SaaS applications with 1,000 – 50,000 customers.
Note: In the monthly prices below I have incorporated the upfront costs for 1- and 3-year contracts in the monthly prices (spread out over the full term).
All prices are calculated for the EU region (Ireland).

Windows web server. No additional storage.

Configuration	Resources	On-demand (hourly) p/m	1-year term p/m	3-year term p/m
M1 large instance	2 cores, 7.6 GB memory	€200	€131	€99
M1 extra large instance	4 cores, 15 GB memory	€400	€262	€198
M3 double extra large instance	8 “second-generation” cores, 30 GB memory	€859	€554	€419

Traffic out (to the internet) is an additional €92 per TB.

Load-balanced high-activity Windows web server.

Amazon Elastic Load Balancer
3 M3 double extra large EC2 instance on 3-year terms
5 TB of internet traffic per month
Total cost per month = €1763

Database server, EC2 instance with Windows server 2008/2012 and SQL Server Web Edition 2008/2012.

Prices below include 1TB of database storage on EBS (Elastic Block Storage, Amazon’s virtual drives). For instances without guaranteed I/O I have included 500 million I/O requests per months. Upfront costs have been spread over the months of the term.

Configuration	Resources	Guaranteed I/O	On-demand (hourly) p/m	1-year term p/m	3-year term p/m
High-memory extra-large instance	2 cores, 17 GB memory	(no guaranteed I/O)	€463	€292	€249
High-memory double extra-large instance	4 cores, 34 GB memory	500 Mbps	€798	€467	€384
High-memory quadruple extra-large instance	8 cores, 68 GB memory	1000 Mbps	€1491	€829	€666

Note that you would also need additional storage for database backups, which could add €100-500 per month, depending on backup methods and backup retention.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user8364

Partner at a tech consulting company with 51-200 employees

Aug 3, 2013

AWS: What are the key Amazon Web Services components?

Over the last couple of years, the popularity of the “cloud computing” has grown dramatically and along with it so has the dominance of Amazon Web Services (AWS) in the market. Unfortunately, AWS doesn’t do a great job of explaining exactly what AWS is, how its pieces work together, or what typical use cases for its components may be. This post is an effort to address this by providing a whip around overview of the key AWS components and how they can be effectively used.

Great, so what is AWS? Generally speaking, Amazon Web Services is a loosely coupled collection of “cloud” infrastructure services that allows customers to “rent” computing resources. What this means is that using AWS, you as the client are able to flexibly provision various computing resources on a “pay as you go” pricing model. Expecting a huge traffic spike? AWS has you covered. Need to flexibly store between 1 GB or 100 GB of photos? AWS has you covered. Additionally, each of the components that makes up AWS is generally loosely coupled meaning that they can work independently or in concert with other AWS resources.

Keep reading

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

Buyer's Guide

Amazon AWS

April 2025

Free Report: Amazon AWS Reviews and More

Learn what your peers think about Amazon AWS. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: April 2025.

DOWNLOAD NOW

856,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.

it_user6696

Director of IT at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees

May 27, 2013

Download

Great platform, but needs a lot of attention.

Valuable Features:

Comprehensive Cloud platform offering, with a huge ecosystem of ISV partners, great selection of pre-built images, and much more!! Pricing cannot be beat, and new features and reduction in price are always in the works.

Room for Improvement:

It is a highly complex product, and requires training and familiarization before use.

Other Advice:

To optimally use this product, invest in training and development projects initially.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user6579Engineer at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Report as inappropriate

Jun 9, 2013

Nice Review by author.

No doubt, AWS as a product is one of the great cloud platform. But there customer support is also great. It also offers the feature to scale any portion of your stack. Starting with Route 53 for DNS, moving to an ELB for load balancing, and going to RDS for backend.

See all 2 comments

it_user6144

Technical Architect at a tech company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Apr 25, 2013

Great way to enter into the cloud. Disk performance is generally the issue.

great way to enter into the cloud. disk performance is generally the issue.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user4401Developer at a transportation company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Report as inappropriate

Oct 2, 2013

What I like at EC2 is the easy creation and termination of servers and that it allows experimentation without too much cost. It has a lot of services to choose with different OS options. Also, I like the simplicity and the elasticity. But EC2 is expensive and I dislike the hidden charges and the contract terms.

it_user1158

Developer at a tech company with 51-200 employees

Jul 18, 2012

Download

A bit pricey cloud service, but with good features, and worth the money.

Valuable Features:

- Amazon Web Services offer a very low pricing option based on usage, with no up-front payment. - Amazon Web Services can be used as a Content delivery network, as Amazon has multiple data hosting centers spread across the globe. - Amazon Web Services is a highly secure durable technology platform, for hosting all your applications over the cloud. The AWS storage facility is very scalable and grows and shrinks as per your needs. You only pay for the exact usage and not more. - AWS is a not dependent on any programming language or any kind of operating system platform. You are free to choose the development platform or programming model that is suitable for your application and business. You can also decide what services you want to use and how to use them. This takes the burden of focusing on infrastructure off your shoulders. - There’s less IT infrastructure staff to manage.

Room for Improvement:

- Though not very often, Amazon services are known to go down once in a while. If you are running highly intensive businesses off Amazon, you might end up losing a big chunk of your revenue due to AWS break downs. You might have to think of alternative backup options as well. - The other thing to keep in mind is the cost factor. Though the prices are not sky high, if you are a startup then you have to answer the big question: Is cloud comparatively a cheaper option or is it more expensive? - Initial learning curve, sometimes takes a bit of time and deters quite a lot of people from doing their business with AWS, so make sure you spend sometime to ramp up with AWS.

Other Advice:

A good cloud service that takes care of all the back end infrastructure management and administration work off your hands. The pay-as-you-go option is very suitable for most of the organizations. Prices are a bit higher when compared to hosting your service over your own hardware. However, you get the benefits of having your application over a cloud. The auto-scale feature is something worth the money, as you don't have to worry about deploying more servers when there is a high demand during peak times.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user1065

Senior Manager of Data Center at a integrator with 51-200 employees

Jul 1, 2012

Download

Amazon AWS is till dat,e the best IaaS providers on compute, storage, and availability platform

Valuable Features:

Few things I admire about this whole AWS service by Amazon are 1) Provides persistent block storage volumes 2) Excellent load balancing features for servers 3) Excellent support on all types of relational databases, for example Oracle etc. 4) Awesome repository of operating systems from Ubuntu, Slackware, Microsoft Servers etc. 5) The virtual private cloud feature is an amazing add on for the service

Room for Improvement:

Few cons of the AWS platform are- 1) Lack of .NET support 2) A bit costlier than Microsoft Azure based on computer per hour and outbound bandwidth. 3) Unavailability of middleware caching, integration and identity management.

Other Advice:

One of the first and extremely professional services launched for the cloud platform is the advent of Amazon AWS. The bundle of services provided by them such as CloudFront, CloudWatch, EC2, Simple Storage service etc undoubtedly cover all the aspects needed by the developers and system administrators to match infrastructure and scalability issues for the growing demands.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user897

CSO at a consultancy with 51-200 employees

Jun 14, 2012

Download

Easy, flexible, high-quality

Valuable Features:

Quick to set up, dynamic pricing, very good support.

Room for Improvement:

Pricy for dedicated servers. The base package for fast bandwidth was more than I anticipated paying.

Other Advice:

They have a package where you pay an upfront cost and get locked in for a year, but the monthly cost (or per-hour cost) is much lower. Try this out if you know you'll be with them for at least a year.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

reviewer1177074

CloudOps Leader at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

Feb 2, 2022

Download

Ever-improving, stable solution but could use APM monitoring

Pros and Cons

"Since AWS came a bit later to the market, they are always improving and upgrading their platform."

"They do not yet have a complete solution for APM monitoring. But this, along with real user monitoring, is something that they are actively working on improving."

What is our primary use case?

I am the leader of a team that runs cloud operations for our clients. We work with AWS on a daily basis using it for synthetic and real use monitoring. Our company is partnered with AWS.

What is most valuable?

Since AWS came a bit later to the market, they are always improving and upgrading their platform.

What needs improvement?

They do not yet have a complete solution for APM monitoring. But this, along with real user monitoring, is something that they are actively working on improving.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using AWS for about a year.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The solution is very stable.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

The solution is easily scalable.

How are customer service and support?

My team and I have not needed to contact support.

How was the initial setup?

In general, the initial setup was quite easy.

What other advice do I have?

I would rate this product a seven out of ten.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Public Cloud

If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Partner