Not really, I think you nailed it. Note we do have 1 year reserved instances for a few of our EC2 VMs so the cost is probably closer to the $1300 a month once amortized.
We can probably reduce cost a bit by moving Redis to a EC2 instance and rolling our own vs using ElasticCache which is a bit of a premium.
Overall, we have been very happy with our AWS experience, but it is certainly a bit pricey compared to our bare metal setup. We also squeeze a tiny bit more performance out of our bare meta setup than AWS, but we are not talking 2x difference, more like 5-30% difference on the server side.
Note it is important to have full perspective on costs here, cause even if you can do $80 on digital ocean, you miss out on:
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Auto scaling, which helps us a fair bit on some super enterprise setups
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Accounting for Prometheus based monitoring which we have. For context NewRelic would be sitting at say $100 per server and then you would also need DataDog which is another $50 or so
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We also ship with ELK so you would need something like logit https://logit.io/pricing which is yet more money
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Our PG setup has automatic failover so you would need 2x instances on digital ocean to account for something like this plus a complicated setup.
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Our Redis setup has automatic failover (so another 2x instances for that)
The bottom line is that $10-$80 is perfectly fine for an unmonitored monolithic setup. But once you need to start talking SLAs and need to know this thing will be rock solid and survive random failuresโฆ well costs start mounting.