Lesson Three

The AWS pricing calculator will help you estimate the monthly cost based on your expected usage. Now this will really come and handy if you’re trying to estimate the cost of something very elaborate, but I want to keep things simple and keep this video moving along.

In this video we’re going to simulate the usage of adding videos to your S3 account for either downloading a zip file or for streaming those videos and we’re going to use this free pricing calculator to demonstrate how to estimate those expenses. First off, you need to get to the calculator page and that’s at calculator.s3.amazonaws.com and that will bring you to this page here. The next thing you want to do is go over to the top right, make sure that the language of your choice is the one that’s selected and by default I think English is the one that’s selected, and come straight down from there and make sure this box here is unticked because by default this is ticked and that’s going to really skew the numbers here because that’s going to calculate things based on the free usage tier being used, in other words all new customers get the first 12 months for free for the most part, but with this box ticked it’s going to give you some major discounts in here and we don’t want that right now, especially if you’re doing these estimates to provide this information to a potential customer or a client.

Then you want to come over here to the far left and make sure that the proper tool is selected and by default the EC2 is the one that’s selected. You want to click on the Amazon S3. Then you want to come to the right just a little bit and make sure you’ve got the proper region selected that you want to get this estimation for. Again if you’re doing this for a customer or a potential client, make sure you’ve got the region that their bucket is located in or will be located in if they decide to do business with you.

If for some reason you need to start over again, you need to wipe the slate so to speak, click on the reset all button, but whenever you do this be sure and check this box over here because chances are when you click on the reset all, thick check mark is going to show up again in this box and over here on the right column you’ve got these common customer samples. If you want to see what it would cost or the estimated cost based on using all the tools available in AWS to host a free website or to use the elastic beanstalk or a marketing website, go on and click on these guys here. It will throw in the numbers and it might also give you some other ideas on future projects too, and as you add the numbers in these boxes here, you’re going to see the estimate of your monthly bill reflect those additions.

Let’s go ahead and throw some numbers in here. Let’s see for example we have 100 streaming videos that are about 10 megabytes each, that’s going to total 1 gigabyte. That’s going to be our storage for our first month. By the way just some quick numbers here, 1 terabyte equals 1000 gigabytes which equals 1,000,000 megabytes, so a terabyte is a pretty big file. Now then in this particular month we’ve got 50 people that paid us $27, which by the way is pretty darn low for 100 videos. If these videos are of any quality whatsoever, I would be charging closer to $97, at the very least $47 but we’ll go in the low ball in here and say $27, which will come to a total of $1,350. That’s the income to help put in perspective the expense here.