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Asrin for AWS Community Builders

Posted on • Originally published at azcodez.Medium

Save EC2 costs by using a AWS Savings plan

Save EC2 costs by using a AWS Savings plan

This is a real-life case of how I save 38% of EC2 micro cost using EC2 Instance Savings Plan.

I have an EC2 micro running at the moment which is always running a Barbershop website. There is no plans to take down or switch infrastructure within the next year so I thought I would save some costs by pre purchasing the EC2 using EC2 Savings plan.

Calculate savings

First calculate how much you will save using savings using this AWS Savings plan Calculator

Here I calculate my costs for an EC2 micro

As you see here it will cost me 0.0072 per hour.

For a month it will cost around $5.18 (0.0072 x 24 x 30 = 5.184)

Check how much you pay currently for your EC2 in your Billing Dashboard by going to your AWS Billing Dashboard and selecting last month’s bill

As you see below I pay $8.63 per month

So I will save $3.45 per month ($8.63 — $5.18) which would be $41.40 per year. Quite decent for not doing much🤑

Configure a EC2 Savings plan

Once you buy an EC2 savings plan it will automatically be applied to the EC2’s in your AWS account. You don’t need to do anything with your server it’s a billing configuration. See for more information

Go to your AWS Billing Dashboard > Savings Plan > Purchase subscription

Configure your plan as per your EC2 calculations you did above

Term

  • Select — 1 or 3 years (3 years more savings)
  • Region — Make sure to select same region your EC2 is in!
  • Instance family — Select same instance type that your EC2 is

Purchase Commitment

  • Copy the same value you got in your EC2 calculator (you could also pay more if you like)

  • Payment option — select if you want to pay more upfront which would give you even more savings or leave it as no upfront.

Start Date

  • You can set a start date if you like but this is optional.

Double check again the region you are using and the type of EC2

Add to cart

This was my EC2 micro configuration for a year

Submit order

Click inventory and your order will be in review

Above is based on AWS August 2022 pricing

Hope this helps😁

Feel free to comment with questions or feedback✌️

Happy coding,

Az 👨🏾‍💻

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