If you just need proxy support to get around restrictions, EC2 is an expensive way of doing it (assuming you're using it 8 hours a day).
You can get a VPS (http://www.lowendbox.com/ tracks various offers) for as little as 3 USD/month, and have it 24/7/365. Even if you're using an EC2 micro instance, you'd have to use it less than 150 hours a month (out of 730) to get ahead.
I took 0.02 USD/hour for on-demand micro instance; 0.007 USD/hour also requires a $52/yr or $82/3yr fixed cost on top.
I have no idea how to predict the spot price, and I haven't tried to collect statistics on it, so I (personally) wouldn't choose it for this kind of application, where you expect it to be there all the time, not just when it happens to be cheap.
I mean, 3 USD/month, or 30 USD/year, is cheap enough to pay once and forget about, rather than worrying about turning it on or off.
...so I (personally) wouldn't choose it for this kind of application, where you expect it to be there all the time, not just when it happens to be cheap.
It's not very difficult to set up a script to spin up an on-demand instance if your spot instance gets nuked. Or to just buy another spot instance at a higher price.
Thanks for the clarification -- that makes sense. Given amazon's 1-year-free offer and its excellent documentation, I'd still use an EC2 instance for this purpose.
- 82 /3 / 12 = 2.27 (fixed monthly cost for a reserved instance)
- .007 * 24 * 30 = 5.04 (variable monthly cost)
for a total of $7.31, assuming it's running all the time. If it's running only during business hours, the variable monthly cost becomes:
- .007 * 8 * 20 = 1.12
But the thing is, even the micro instance does almost NOTHING when used as a VPN endpoint (CPU and memory are flat) so you can use the machine for anything else (hosting, dealing with other VPN clients, etc.)
The same thing - doing almost nothing when a VPN endpoint - applies to other VPSes at half or less the cost, e.g. http://www.lowendbox.com/blog/forever-hosting-19-95year-256m... - 20 USD/year. Now these are smaller instances, likely more contended, but that's precisely the point - when you don't need much, there's not much value in over-provisioning.
Anyhow, I've said my piece; I think EC2 is over-priced for this specific task; there are other options; and (at least in my case) they aren't blocked by SO, owing to not being as mainstream.
You can get a VPS (http://www.lowendbox.com/ tracks various offers) for as little as 3 USD/month, and have it 24/7/365. Even if you're using an EC2 micro instance, you'd have to use it less than 150 hours a month (out of 730) to get ahead.