Does AWS web app Compute costs mean the amount of time a website is visited?

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I was thinking of hosting in AWS web app. However, After seeing computing costs, I wasn't clear what it meant.

Does it meant straight away $50/month or per hour means the rate of app when it using per hour. Please explain, thanks!

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It fully depends on what you buy from AWS. Each service has its own price tag.

You tagged this as AWS App Runner, which is a service with a price tag, but based on the question I think you aren't planning to use AWS App Runner and you added the tag by mistake (maybe you typed in something like aws-app)

The most basic thing you can do on AWS is buy an EC2 instance (i.e. a virtual server i.e. a virtual computer). You can log into your virtual server and set it up just like a real server. There are a wide variety of server types (instance types) so depending on which one you choose, this can cost from $5 a month up to $200 a month or more.

You pay a certain price for the instance whenever it is turned on, and you pay for the virtual hard disk (EBS volume) until you delete the server from your account. If you want the web app to run all the time then you will need your server to run 24/7 and that is how the monthly price is calculated.

Be aware the displayed monthly price for the instance does not include the EBS volume (hard disk) as it is calculated separately. The price is about $0.10 per month per GB (for the default gp2 type. Change it to gp3 for a $0.02 discount with literally no downside. This is the newer type and I think the default is still gp2 until they thoroughly test the compatibility of gp3). Some types of instances do have real hard disks included in them and don't need EBS, but those are usually more expensive ones so you probably won't use one.

Don't feel bad about penny-pinching by trying to use the cheapest possible server and smallest possible hard disk. That's what the system is designed for, plus it's not like Jeff Bezos needs donations. If you've rented a real server before you might think there's some kind of upgrade cost. AWS doesn't have that. It's free, fully automated and almost instant to change your settings, rent new instances, delete them, whatever.

You don't have to have an instance for a whole month, as the price is actually calculated every hour or minute. One cited advantage of AWS is that if you need to do a difficult processing task, you can buy a very powerful server for a very short time. This isn't what you're looking for right now, but I mention it anyway.


There are also so-called "serverless" services, such as API Gateway and AWS Lambda. With these types of services you usually pay per request. They have advantages and disadvantages. If your website is just a bunch of files that don't change, then it is possible to host it serverlessly in S3 without much fuss. Otherwise you will have to rewrite it to make it work in Lambda as Lambda is not compatible with anything else.