Cost of hosting the Meta Discourse forum on AWS

I also really liked Sam&#x27;s comments at the end:<p><i>&gt; The bottom line is that $10-$80 is perfectly fine for an unmonitored monolithic setup. But once you need to start talking SLAs and need to know this thing will be rock solid and survive random failures… well costs start mounting.</i><p>I&#x27;ve run sites that do tens or hundreds of thousands of uniques a week with base-level VPSes like Linode or DO, spending just $10-20&#x2F;mo on it. But if you require high availability or must meet strict SLAs, you start hitting the Pareto principle pretty hard. You end up needing to pay a lot for that increased certainty, even if you are only squeezing a few more minutes of uptime or flexibility out of it.

You can, right now on eBay, get a machine with many high powered cores and 256GB of RAM, for under $3k USD.<p>Then, you can colocate it for $200 per month or less, with a huge amount of bandwidth included. And $200 is not the much-cheaper colos that are out there, so it is on the high side.<p>HA? Buy a second one and mirror in a different DC.<p>HA config via this method: $6k servers + $2k disk + $400&#x2F;month colo. First year: $12,800 (still cheaper than AWS). Second and third year: $4800 per year.<p>AWS is not the solution for every task.

What percent of the cost is spent on EC2 instances? Curious how much that can be reduced by using something more &quot;lightweight&quot; like Elixir or even Node. Basically, not needing to spin up thousands of OS processes. (Discourse uses Ruby.)

&gt; The main piece of advice I have is … don’t do it. Don’t take on a complex, “enterprisey” cloud install unless you have to. It’s extremely expensive for what you get. Compare to a simple monolithic Digital Ocean droplet running our standard Docker image, which can get you a very long way even at the $40 and $80 per month price points.<p>I really wonder where the line goes between a decent VPS (properly provisioned and configured to handle traffic) and AWS?

Honestly, forum hosting requirements are pretty minimal in general. Indeed, for many scripts, you can get away with a cheap shared hosting account until you have about 50-100,000 points and 10,000 members or so. In many smaller communities cases, they&#x27;ll never outgrow it.<p>And for something like Discourse, well a cheap Digital Ocean VPS or something would work quite well for most people and sites. Most aren&#x27;t active enough to put any real pressure on a hosting account.

Conclusion in the comments from JefF: &quot;The main piece of advice I have is … don’t do it. Don’t take on a complex, “enterprisey” cloud install unless you have to. It’s extremely expensive for what you get. Compare to a simple monolithic Digital Ocean droplet running our standard Docker image, which can get you a very long way even at the $40 and $80 per month price points.&quot;

I’ve been running some on my side projects just using a docker containers on digital ocean and t1.micros and apparently that was the most cost-effective way to run it ?

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I think Sam&#x27;s comment is important:<p>&gt;Note it is important to have full perspective on costs here...<p>All too often I see the &quot;AWS is too expensive&quot; circlejerk devolve into a flat cost argument.<p>It is <i>absolutely</i> more expensive in that regard.<p>That being said, I see very few comparisons that take in to account all of the engineering effort saved by some of the AWS feature set.<p>There are non-trivial things that simply <i>aren&#x27;t a problem anymore</i> on AWS, and time can be spent on actually interesting&#x2F;difficult problems.