

AWS Billing: 5 things you should do right now - alexcasalboni
http://cloudacademy.com/blog/aws-billing-five-things/

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lsiunsuex
#6 - make sure you completely read and understand what your paying for.

Earlier this year, I was trying to plan a migration from Rackspace to AWS -
brought a database server online at AWS on par with the size of ours at
Rackspace and did some testing (to try to simulate a real world scenario). Got
distracted by some other projects for a few weeks and all of a sudden comes a
bill from AWS for almost a grand - we "didn't even use it"

Fortunately, as a 1 time courtesy, they credited it back, but the boss was
definitely not happy, haha.

Be very careful what you turn on and what size it is.

Rackspace, is a bit more clear on pricing IMO.

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alexcasalboni
I think everybody forgets to shut down an instance or two, at least once.

Luckily, you can experiment a lot within the Free Tier, especially for tests
and simulations.

Anyways, which size and what kind of database were you migrating? Have you
tried Aurora yet?

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lsiunsuex
MySQL RDS instance - don't remember the specific size, but large - multiple
processors, high bandwidth, high disk. I was gonna put some automated load on
it to show the boss performance would be comparable to our dedicated server at
Rackspace, and just forgot to turn it off.

The boss is happy with Rackspace and regardless of price, options, features,
etc... he doesn't want to leave. I can only do, what the boss allows me to do.
I don't hate Rackspace, I use them for other projects, but their service has
gone down in recent years IMO.

~~~
alexcasalboni
Well, AWS's costs have been constantly decreasing during the last years. I am
actually quite impressed with the new RDS Aurora update, both as far as
performance and pricing. Especially since migrating from MySQL is as complex
as a configuration switch, with a 5x increase in performance!

