How we brought down our costs by half with just one decision!
The technology stack for CVsIntellect is AngularJS - Java Backend (GAE) - LaTeX instance. This post is about the LaTeX instance.
What does the LaTeX instance do? Takes in a TeX script & outputs a PDF. Simple enough. Its stateless so server restarts etc. are not a problem.
We had hosted CLSI on Amazon EC2 till March this year. We were using t1.micro which was 0.6GB RAM & very low network bandwidth. Its deprecated now.
Our EC2 bills
- Oct, 2013 - $16.59
- Nov, 2013 - $16.12
- Dec, 2013 - $16.57
- Jan, 2014 - $16.61
- Feb, 2014 - $20.04
- Mar, 2014 - $30.68
And then we switched to Digital Ocean!
Switching was easy since the LaTeX instance was transperant to users so we just had to bring up CLSI & point to it from our web server.
Our Digital Ocean bills
- Apr, 2014 - $10
- May, 2014 - $10
- Jun, 2014 - $10
- Jul, 2014 - $10
- Aug, 2014 - $10
- Sep, 2014 - $10
The bills are reduced, but are not exactly half! Ok, let me explain further.
The EC2 instance that we had was almost half the RAM and as we started to grow, the free bandwidth limit was so low our bills started shooting up every month! The Digital Ocean instance is lot more powerful for 2/3rd the cost! It becomes 1/2 or even 1/3rd the cost (last 2 months).
The price comparison
So, we got close to double the hardware at half the cost! Couldn’t have asked for more, Thanks Digital Ocean :-)
