Tax Season Got You Thinking About Savings? Here’s a Quick Cloud Cost Win!

Feeling the pinch of year-end budgets and looking to optimize your cloud spend as you gear up for the New Year (or extend your runway)? Let’s kick things off with one simple, impactful tip:

💡 Switch to Static Storage for Static Web Pages!

It sounds straightforward, but the cost difference can be significant. We recently worked with a client who, in the rush to launch, hosted their static website content on overly-provisioned EC2 instances. These were general-purpose machines, much larger than needed for serving simple HTML, CSS and JavaScript. The result? Unnecessary overhead and a higher monthly bill.

Here’s the Breakdown (More Specific):

Assume 1,000 Daily Active Users (DAU) and content of about 50MB.

• Scenario 1: EC2 Instance 
  • Costs – $40.00-$60.00/hr.
  • Bandwidth (Outbound): Assume each user downloads on average 1MB of data per day (HTML, CSS, images). That’s 1GB/day total, or 30GB/month. AWS data transfer out from EC2 to the internet costs around $0.09/GB. That′s  $2.70/ month.
  • Total approximate cost for a single EC2: $71.70
  • Additional costs –  fallback, instance, machine image
• Scenario 2: S3 Storage (50MB Static Site) with CloudFront:
  • S3 Storage: Storing 50MB on S3 is negligible, costing well under **0.01/month∗∗.Let′sjustsay0.01 to keep the math going.
  • S3 Data Retrieval: Because we are using CloudFront, data retrieval should be almost non-existent to calculate.
  • CloudFront Data Transfer: CloudFront charges for data transfer and requests. Assuming 90% of requests are served from CloudFront’s cache. Each User still requests about 1MB a day that comes off the server. At a cost of $0.085 per GB in us-east-1. We have 10% * 1000requets * 1MB * 30 days = 3000MB or roughly 3GB a month @ $0.085 = $0.255/ month
  • Monthly Requests: Ignoring the free tier for the 3 million requests, 1000 (users) *30 (days) / .000002 cents per request .06
  • CloudFront: Total Cost: $.32.
  • Total approximate cost for S3 CloudFront: Approximately $0.33

The Bottom Line: In this specific scenario, hosting your static site on and EC2 instance costs over 200x as the cost per month; this does not include the management or patching of the EC2 environment alone.

In summary:

• Significant Cost Savings: Drastically reduce your cloud bill.
• Improved Performance: CDNs like CloudFront offer faster content delivery through global edge locations.
• Simplified Management: S3 and CloudFront are fully managed services, reducing operational overhead compared to managing EC2 instances.
  

Want More Cost-Saving Strategies?

This is just one of many ways to optimize your cloud infrastructure. We have 20+ more techniques to help you slash your bills, along with daily monitoring to ensure you’re always operating efficiently.

Ready to keep your tech costs under control?

Let’s Talk!

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