Let’s talk about something that’ll save you money.
Most website’s goal is to make on-boarding process smoother. For example signups, saving credit details, buying a product and other actions.
More effortless the better.
So talking about effortless on-boarding.. Having used AWS for few years and I can tell you they have a very decent interface.
Even to a non-technical person their interface screams “Click here!”.
Beware! It’s a double edged sword though, people love clicking around interface thinking it’s all free.
Personally I’ve created RDS instances many times and never made this mistake. Until recently thanks to their swift interface that doesn’t care to tell me the costs!
Where it went wrong..
RDS offers a way to speed-up your DB queries, it gives you more I/O operations per second. It’s good thing when the workload is high so the system can continue working without bottle-necking. It’s not free tho!
This is a default setting, means you’ll pay more unless you switch to other setting (General Purpose Storage). This is what I usually do.
Regardless of the option you choose, AWS won’t tell you the costs difference. Major issue.
That’s where they got me this time, I forgot to change the Storage to General Purpose and that skyrocketed my bill! Couple hundred £££!
Important lesson:
– Double check each service, AWS is tricky with costs.
– Triple check each addon they sell under each service. Uncheck anything you don’t need.
My advice so this doesn’t happen to you:
- Use AWS costs calculator. This allows you to add/remove services and see the cost difference in real time. https://calculator.aws/#/
- Keep track of services you’ve created. You can also see this in Billing but I advice you note this elsewhere.
- Keep an eye out on the billing (at-least for first couple days).
You already made a mistake, do you have to pay?
It depends. I’d contact AWS support and ask them if they can make adjustments to the bill. Often they’ll be OK with it. Yup, I’ve been there.
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