Shahzad Khan

I carried out a quick estimate on the monthly cost of a reasonably CPU intensive web application being run on a cloud computing platform. The results are quite interesting:

Cloud Computing Costs Summary
Configuration: 10 CPU instances, 1 TB of data transfer, and 0.5 TB of data storage

Amazon EC2: 720 + 150 + 50 = 920
Google App Engine: 720 + 100 + 75 = 895
Slicehost: 70 * 10 = 700

Amazon EC2 pricing:
http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/#pricing

CPU (monthly):
0.1/hour (windows)
$72 per month

Date:
0.15 per GB
150 per TB

Storage:
$0.10 per GB-month of provisioned storage
100 per TB-month

Google App Engine
http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/billing.html#Billable_Quota_Unit_Cost

Outgoing Bandwidth      gigabytes      $0.12
Incoming Bandwidth     gigabytes     $0.10
CPU Time     CPU hours     $0.10
Stored Data     gigabytes per month     $0.15

CPU (monthly): 72
$163 per month

Date:
0.15 per GB
150 per TB

Storage:
$0.10 per GB-month of provisioned storage
100 per TB-month

Slicehost
http://www.slicehost.com/

10 instances of 1GB slice
400GB storage
6TB bandwidth
10 cpu instances (burstable to equivalent of 40)
$70 * 10 = 700

Note: The primary constraint on slicehost is storage. You get more bandwidth and CPU capability using multiple slices working together as compared to the standard cloud computing offered by EC2 or App Engine