Cloud Cost Calculator

Using this page, you can compare costs across a large number of server offerings. Click on the yellow blocks to narrow down the choices, as follows:

• Provider -- restrict to specific hosting companies.
• Region -- restrict to a particular geographic region.
• Term -- restrict to a particular lease type: on-demand / hourly, monthly, etc.
• Cost -- restrict to servers in a particular price range. You can restrict the up-front cost, hourly cost, or both. (Offerings which don't require an up-front purchase have an up-front cost of 0.)
• System -- select servers with a particular range of CPU cores and/or memory. See the blog post for a discussion of how CPU cores are measured.
• Storage -- select servers with a particular amount of disk and/or SSD (flash) storage.

Some options are used to compute the "amortized monthly cost". This is your total cost, divided by the number of months you'll be using the server. Any upfront cost is spread out across the usage period, according to the interest rate you specify. In the case of EC2 reserved instances, if you won't be using the full reservation lifetime, then we factor in the resale value.

• Usage -- how many hours per day you'll be running the server, and for how many months.
• Capital -- the cost-of-capital you use when making financial decisions. If you'd prefer to minimize upfront costs, even if it means spending more in the long term, then specify a higher value.
• Resale -- if you think Amazon may lower the price of EC2 reservations, thus making your reservation worth less at resale, then reduce this figure. The default figure of 100% means that a partially used reservation can be sold at its full pro-rata value. (We take Amazon's 10% commission into account separately, so if you specify 100%, you're expecting to sell the instance for full value and collect 90% after commission.)

The last option allows you to see servers described in per-dollar units. For instance, an EC2 m1.small on-demand server has 39.7 MB RAM per dollar per month: 1.7 GB of RAM, divided by the monthly cost of $43.83, yields 39.7 MB. This is particularly useful for sorting: sort on per-dollar units to see which servers are most cost-effective for a particular resource.