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I'm in the planning stages of estimating server costs for my web application. How can I determine how many Amazon EC2 instances will I need to handle a database backed web application with 1M active users? How should I go about filling out this monthly calculator on Amazon's site?

http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/calc5.html

The web application will be somewhat akin to a social networking site. There will be most likely small, but anywhere from 100,000 to 500,000 data transfers from users to the servers on a daily basis.

user1183233
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    This is probably a common concern for many people - and obviously it's very hard to put an actual cost to this with so many variables - what is the best way to deal with this concern and remove some of the uncertainty? – just__matt Mar 16 '12 at 22:11

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To get an accurate estimate of your costs, you will have understand the application architecture, usage patterns and how many servers (instances) and storage and data transfer you expect to use.

Take a look at this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PsEX3W6lHN4&list=PLhr1KZpdzukcAtqFF32cjGUNNT5GOzKQ8 This video might help you understand how to use the calculator and fill up different values in it.

Jin

jnv106
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Capacity planning is yours, it's specific to app so nobody including Amazon can suggest anything on that regards. Regarding cost estimation, yes you can use monthly calculator. Only thing I could suggest is that when you do your capacity planning make sure that you do your homework like which AWS service you are going to use. For each service you might want to find out unit of measure used for pricing. Once you know that you should do your capacity planning accordingly to find out how much you are projecting to use for a given UOM of a given service on monthly basis. One exception to that is, as you can reserve instances for 3-5 years with upfront fees so you might want to spread that cost across 3 or 5 years based on your choice.

Sandip Dhummad
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