> How did you significantly reduce your AWS cost?
We moved to Google Cloud Platform.
Snark aside, we're continuing to be pretty happy about that decision, in addition to paying a lot less.
Ask HN: How did you significantly reduce your AWS cost?
41–50 of 78 posts
Re: Ask HN: How did you significantly reduce your AWS cost?
#42The HFT Guy has a good blog and did some posts on this. Basically Google Cloud is much cheaper than AWS so you should look at that. There are also other alternatives including IBM SoftLayer which I've never looked at before. "Run an entire tech company in the cloud, or run only a single [big] project requiring more than 10 servers? Google Compute Engine Run less than 10 servers, for as little cost as possible? Digita…
I like his summary however, on the low end, I found OVH is more affordable than DigitalOcean depending on your needs. Digital Ocean is $20/month for 2 GB of RAM while OVH is $28/month for 7 GB with roughly similar specs for the rest (SSD, etc). Note that OVH also offers VPS SSD with 8 GB for $13.50/month however it doesn't automatically renew (at least in Canadian region) so you have to manually pay your bill each month. The $28/month option is under their public cloud offering and supposedly does auto renew.
You can also scale up memory at OVH without scaling up the rest of the server. So you can get to 15 GB of RAM for $34/month (at Digital Ocean, that is closer to $120/month or $160/month with much better specs for rest of server). But if all you need is more RAM...
Digital Ocean is a lot more user-friendly though than OVH. If you need good support, DO is probably a better bet.
Re: Ask HN: How did you significantly reduce your AWS cost?
#43This blog post is straight forward and useful: https://www.datawire.io/4-simple-strategies-for-managing-you...
tl;dr: Configure your reserved instances to be region-scoped; buy in a popular region; pay-as-you-go not upfront; sell your excess reserved instances (like you mentioned)
Re: Ask HN: How did you significantly reduce your AWS cost?
#44Shameless plug here. Working on an side hustle to help you monitor and measure your AWS spend: http://www.cloudforecast.io
You'll get a daily report that breaks down your cost for you via inbox with weather symbols indicating the health of your cost. Think of this like the weather you check every morning before you start your day. Our forecasting in our report is pretty accurate too!
Hit me up if anyone is interested with helping us and provide product feedback. We're offering a 60 day free trial for our first users so we can evolve from a reporting tool to a tool that help you save on AWS cost.
Would love to hook you all up: hello@cloudforecast.io
This post has been super helpful to figure out what we should start thinking about and what to build next!
Re: Ask HN: How did you significantly reduce your AWS cost?
#45We stopped storing our IoT raw data in databases. We still need to search it, but now we store only metadata in the database (we know what we will search by, so we can make appropriate metadata) and store the raw data in S3. So any searches are in the DB, using the DB for what it is good at. This means that our storage / database cost approaches just the S3 cost, because our metadata is ~0.001 the size of the raw dat…
How slow is it to retrieve the data from s3 though?
Yes, s3 is very slow. Maybe to pursuade clients to move to their db solution.
Re: Ask HN: How did you significantly reduce your AWS cost?
#46The HFT Guy has a good blog and did some posts on this. Basically Google Cloud is much cheaper than AWS so you should look at that. There are also other alternatives including IBM SoftLayer which I've never looked at before. "Run an entire tech company in the cloud, or run only a single [big] project requiring more than 10 servers? Google Compute Engine Run less than 10 servers, for as little cost as possible? Digita…
I like his summary however, on the low end, I found OVH is more affordable than DigitalOcean depending on your needs. Digital Ocean is $20/month for 2 GB of RAM while OVH is $28/month for 7 GB with roughly similar specs for the rest (SSD, etc). Note that OVH also offers VPS SSD with 8 GB for $13.50/month however it doesn't automatically renew (at least in Canadian region) so you have to manually pay your bill each mo…
On the low end, Linode is also an option: 2GB/$10.
Re: Ask HN: How did you significantly reduce your AWS cost?
#47Check your cloudfront and data transfer usage. We had bingbot overcrawling a number of our urls resulting in high cloudfront costs.
Re: Ask HN: How did you significantly reduce your AWS cost?
#48[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: How did you significantly reduce your AWS cost?
#49I didn't see this one mentioned.
Use VPC end points for S3 to save cost.
If you are using NAT gateways and S3 (probably applies to Dynamo as well) and your app is using S3 then you could be saving $$ by having that traffic run through a VPC endpoint which is free bandwidth and not using the NAT gateway which is paid.
Re: Ask HN: How did you significantly reduce your AWS cost?
#50When you can't use reserved instances... switching to GCP (with their automatic discount) saved us ~50%.