[ridruejo]

The ultimate budget VPS is an Amazon instance. You can be relatively sure that it is not going to go under. You can run one free micro instance (http://aws.amazon.com/free/). You can scale as needed easily, both in terms of file system and CPU by simply rebooting your EBS to another instance type. You can have reliable, incremental snapshots. And finally, you have a great ecosystem of vendors providing AMIs for nearly all OS versions and popular web apps (like my own, http://bitnami.org/stacks)

[pieter]

Amazon isn't really budget. The free tier is nice, and the tiny instances are priced ok, but beyond that they're quite expensive for a VPs. The nice thing with AWS is the scaling and the supporting infrastructure, but you do pay for that compared to more basic VPS offerings.

[rkalla]

Just a reminder to everyone that prices out the flat On-Demand rates of Amazon, a 3-year reserved instance price is 48% cheaper than OnDemand.

So if you know what your deployment needs are, take the On-Demand price and roughly divide it in half for your real cost-per-month (with a majority paid up front).

If you don't know what kind of deployment you need, then yes, running everything on-demand can be pricey compared to alternatives.

[ridruejo]

In addition to reserved instances, there are a couple of other ways you can achieve cost-savings for common situations. If you need to run background tasks (like video encoding, reports, etc) you can try running spot instances at a fraction of the cost of an on-demand instance. You run the risk that the instance is terminated, but you can always spawn a new one without affecting the main service, since basically you do not care if the task finishes a couple of minutes later. Another one is scaling up and down base on demand. If you run, say, a SugarCRM instance for your sales team, you can have it run in a Large instance during the week, 9-5pm, when it is going to be in full use by multiple people. Then, the rest of the time you can scale down to a small or micro instance. It is still going to be available, but at a smaller cost.

[sorenbs]

Is that a fixed price for the next 3 years then? I would expect normal prices to at least be cut in half 3 years from now as hardware gets cheaper.

[ridruejo]

You pay a fixed price for the reservation and then per-usage fees. Usage fees will drop as Amazon reduces them, but the reservation is a one-time deal

[ridruejo]

Well, if we are talking about bigger instances, then it is not "budget VPS" anymore either :) Still, depending on your needs (and specially if you combine with reserved instances, which can drive the cost 50%) it can be quite cost-effective

[sathyabhat]

Yeah, and not to forget, the free tier offer expires in November

[ntoshev]

I believe it expires an year after you started using it. Do you have a reference saying it won't be available for anyone after November 2011?

[sathyabhat]

Ah, you're right, my bad.

Relevant part of the terms:

These free tiers are only available to new AWS customers and are available for 12 months following your AWS sign-up date

[blameless]

Don't forget you also have to pay something like $0.10 for 1GB of outgoing traffic.

[ridruejo]

You still get 15GB for free in the free tier, which should be ok for many use cases

[nknight]

Yeah, but most people pushing more than a few tens of GB/month probably don't really need to save a few dollars over e.g. Linode.

Budget VPSs are the modern "shell account", their primary users are a combination of learners, early-stage developers, small-scale control-freaks, people who don't know any better, and of course the odd criminal enterprise.

Some of these will never grow much, the ones that do should normally have the cash for better accommodations and/or more EC2 bandwidth, and the criminals I don't really care about.

[bcl]

Or go one step further (depending on the design of your site) and switch to just S3 and CloudFront. I'm paying about $0.50/mo to host my sites since I converted to using static files.