Moving Away from the Amazon Cloud

I wrote quite a few posts about Amazon Web Services and I hosted my blog there too for a while, but after some time I decided to switch back to a cheaper hosting provider and leave Amazon for the big projects inside our company. This turned out to be quite tricky.

Moving away from the Amazon cloud has some pitfalls you should watch out for. So this post is not only a note to myself about how to do it right next time, but also a note for you readers on how to hopefully save some time and money. Due to lack of experience and not reading everything carefuly the first time, it took me two months and around $35 just to move away from the cloud. Now that’s the kind of money I’d spend to buy a new book, but certainly not just to make Amazon $35 richer ;)

I made a rough checklist below of stuff to watch out for, and Amazon’s prices according to October 2010:

• When terminating all instances in the cloud, make sure you check every region (US East, US West, Ireland and Singapore) – pricing start at around $0.10/hr
• Clear your S3 buckets, and remove them – Amazon charges $0.15 per GB-month for S3 storage
• Remove your EBS shots, from all regions – $0.11-0.18 for storage/shapshots per GB-month
• Elastic IP addresses – Amazon charges $0.01 for non-attached IP addresses per hour, that’s $14 per month!

And please, do double check if there’s anything else in your AWS Management Console, especially if you get a notification from your bank next month. Make sure you scan all available regions! Another way to terminate your AWS account is to instruct your bank not to pay to Amazon at all ;)

If there’s anything else you would add to the list above, make sure to leave a comment below or poke me on Twitter (@kovshenin). To stay tuned and never miss a post, subscribe to my RSS feed. Cheers!