Simon Willison’s Weblog

What kind of website can be run on AWS for 10, 100, 1 thousand, 10 thousand, 100 thousand, 1 million dollars per month?

27th October 2013

My answer to What kind of website can be run on AWS for 10, 100, 1 thousand, 10 thousand, 100 thousand, 1 million dollars per month? on Quora

“But is there a simple way to say that for 10$ per month you can run website on AWS, that has X unique users and Y data transfer...”

Sadly not—it’s not even possible to come up with a rough approximation, because every site (and every potential site architecture) is so different.

For a site that doesn’t change much—a blog for example—you can run a caching system like Varnish on just a single inexpensive instance and serve millions of hits per day.

For a site that does complex, personalised calculations for every user that same instance might only support a hundred users at once.

The impact of technology choice and nature of site is so crucial that there can be no rule of thumb for estimating the cost of the service here.