Always looking to save money here! Quick tip to saving quite a bit on Route 53 AWS Resolver costs…
Increase the TTL of all of your DNS records to their maximum!
Anyone else care to share cost cutting tips?
There is a phenomenon I have noticed with AWS…
Try searching for any cost saving advice/tips on a Search Engine and you’ll notice there are few to none of them. Its almost as if Amazon has paid off to have them eliminated across the board.
Normal hosting providers don’t charge for the DNS at all. I wonder why AWS does for their Route 53? Is it so special?
Nothing special at all @George, we noticed it looking at cost break-downs in billing, 60% of the costs are due to resolution (Route 53 costs) it appears. I went through everything yesterday and have seen a dramatic drop in prediction for monthly costs.
Before:
After:
Obviously the day is not done yet but seeing these charts every day I can already see a substantial difference.
We are also going to switch Zones to North Virginia (US East 1) and stick all our instances there, currently in Europe/London (EU West 2). So I will update as we discover where to save money as we tweak our environment further.
We have on average 15 or so DNS look-ups per domain, two to an Alias, for Load Balancing, for the A records (seems no way to set the TTL for these that we have found yet), all the rest had predominantly 300 seconds set for the TTL, which is beyond stupid as a default, and a hidden way for Amazon to reap income in my opinion…
Cheeky &%$#s…
I’m thinking to transfer the domains over to someone like Fasthosts (domains secured through AWS) and control DNS from there and cut them out of the loop, sorry for my ramblings, thinking aloud. Hopefully save others from this issue.
That is what I hate about AWS - all the hidden costs… Better use Digital Ocean - much clearer billing.
Or Hetzner if you want the same quality for much less.
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We use a wide range of their services now. Still the costs are so much lower than hosting our own servers. We are talking about hundreds of Euro’s in savings. Like you say lots of hidden costs involved and finding what they are is a nightmare and time consuming. But, and a BIG but, for our needs and what we do, now moving in to AI and ML, we need them. We have apps being designed around image recognition so to accomplish this away from AWS would be in the tens of thousands simply to provision the hardware required to do so, and if it fails we would lose that investment. So in that regard AWS allows us to experiment without laying out a fortune up-front. As well as clients demanding more and more services and integrations its still a relatively good deal. For others who just want hosting you’re absolutely correct though and I agree with you entirely.
An example, recognizing a table (furniture), we need every color table, every type of table, size of table, and angle of table. Just for a table is GBs of images! Can’t do that on Digital Ocean, or Hetzner lol… Then there are chairs, sofas, yada-yada!
Its crazy but fun, BUT (another BIG one) the potential is HUGE!
There are plenty open source deep learning solutions that you can deploy on your own servers, you don’t need Amazon for that unless you are willing to pay huge.
And deep learning is pretty much resources intensive, so it is better to run it on your own servers where you have full control and not be surprised by the AWS bill afterwards.
See things like:
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Have seen the above article and many others, also have an ML team who have years of exeprience working with us who know a lot more than me. We ran all our own servers, for many years, and the cost was astronomical George! Please point me to a server provider you feel offers a good deal? We paid for all of our own hardware and co-located many of them. Any idea the cost of memory and processors involved just to deploy a single rack? Processor alone is around 10k for a single box, two in each, memory the same... Done that route both in gaming (in the days when Opterons were released and in partnership with AMD, and still was a huge investment). Not disagreeing with you George but to set this up would be a layout of over 50-60k minimal, not including travel and maintenance costs...
Hetzner has pretty cheap - even dedicated servers. So you don’t really need to manage your own hardware.
Maybe, but there is always a minimum contract of a year on most, custom provisioning too. Really do appreciate your help and advice in a huge capacity, no doubt about that. So thanks we’ll look in to all you have suggested.
That would be a cool topic for a blog. Or even a service that helps people cut costs with cloud services. I can see an easy monetization scheme there.
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