About a month ago I got an email from Amazon that they had introduced a nano instance. This was a very timely email as I was just nearing the end of my free year of AWS (your first year they give you enough of an EC2 budget to run a t2.micro instance for free). I had been running this site on the micro instance (as why not when you aren’t paying for it), but yesterday I got a bill for my EC2 usages. It was $11.46 for the month of December.

This site is mostly idle and only has a few readers so it is an ideal candidate to go to that new t2.nano instance. A few minutes ago I made the switch over it was fairly easy to make the switch. You just stop your instance and then in the EC2 console change the instance type and start it back up and you are good to go. Of course, since I was worried about something going wrong, I first backed up the blog using the UpdraftPlus plugin and stored it in my google drive. I then made a snapshot of the EBS Volume in EC2 just to be safe. But it was a super easy operation and I made the switch in about 1 minute. That will cut my hourly cost from $0.013 per hour to $0.0065 per hour, so half the price. Looking forward to a bill of around $5.50 next month, which it is hard to find hosting for less than that, especially with the level of control you get in EC2.

If you are running a low volume site look into it and see if you can save some money.