Since Januar my website is not any longer a WordPress blog running on an EC2 instance. The previous setup included an EC2 instance that supported running a database (MySQL) and a web server (Apache 2). As several thousand people around the world access my web page I could not run this on the smallerst EC2 instance type available. Instead, I had to go a little bit higher in the specs. Of course, it was still a very modest hardware setup. I used to run other services on the same server, but the main driver was serving web pages.
Numbers
While the EC2 instance served me well and was for over 10 years in use, it turned into a cost factor. One of my intention to use Amplify was also to not only increase page speed. I also wanted to save money. After changing the setup and switching to Amplify one question to answer is: how much does it cost? Is it now cheaper to run my web site? Do I save money? To be able to answer this question, I first had to stop the EC2 instance, delete the backups, release the IP address and end all other services associated to my EC2 instance. These left over services are now all deleted. I am now running my web site on Amplify for almost 4 months. Time to check the costs.
As you can see: you can see almost nothing. The biggest costs in February were still the EC2 costs: the server was shut down, but still consuming space, the IP address was still assigned to me. After removing these costs factors: the costs went down drastically. March and April are the months I only pay for Amplify.
What is costing money now is building the web site. Every time I publish a new article, the website gets build in Amplify and this costs money. Publishing 4, 5 or even 6 posts per months keeps the costs under 2$. Including traffic. And believe me: I do have traffic on this website I did not expected to have.
Money
The cost savings per months are surprisingly high. At peak, I paid almost 20$ per month thanks to EC2 hardware and traffic. At a low month, it was around 13$. Now I am close to 1$. In average, I should save around 15$ per month. OK, I lost a few nice features I had enabled on the EC2 instance. However, I think I can survive without having them.