Note: We offer a service for "Installation and Setup of your SocialEngine website on Amazon Cloud (AWS)" and "Speeding up your SocialEngine Website".

Amazon AWS is a great platform for hosting your SocialEngine website: It is both robust and economical. Many of our Clients have realized the numerous benefits of hosting their communities on Amazon AWS.

Amazon had recently announced price reductions for various AWS services (including EC2, RDS, S3 and CloudFront) which will provide you big savings. To see complete details, please visit: http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2014/03/aws-price-reduction-42-ec2-s3-rds-elasticache-and-elastic-mapreduce.html .

The new reduced prices for AWS are now effective starting from April 1, 2014. To calculate the cost estimates for hosting your website on AWS, you can use this easy calculator: http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/calc5.html.

For medium-sized communities, we would suggest the below AWS services to be used, with their respective cost estimates:

Amazon EC2:-
Configuration: Linux on m3.medium + 1 year Heavy Reserved 
Cost Estimates Break-up: One-Time Payment of USD 222.00 + Monthly Payment of USD 13.18 
Total Yearly Cost Estimate: USD 380.16

Amazon RDS:-
Configuration: db.m1.small + 1 year Heavy Utilization Reserved
Cost Estimates Break-up: One-Time Payment of USD 123.00 + Monthly Payment of USD 11.72
Total Yearly Cost Estimate: USD 263.64

Amazon S3 Storage + Cloud Front
Cost Estimates Break-up: USD 3 Monthly
Total Yearly Cost Estimate: USD 36
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Hence, Total Yearly Cost Estimate of above services = 380.16 + 263.64 + 36 = USD 679.80 (USD 57 monthly)

The above cost estimate is for our recommended hosting configuration on Amazon AWS for a medium-sized community. As your community grows, the flexibility of AWS enables you to re-size your configurations.

For the above cost estimates, we have considered 1 year reserved instances. After you become comfortable with your AWS hosting configurations, you can save further by going for 3 years reserved instances. For above configurations, the cost estimates for 3 years Reserved Instances of EC2 +  RDS + S3 + CloudFront are:

Cost Estimates Break-up: One-Time Payment of USD 525.00 + Monthly Payment of USD 21
Total Cost Estimate for 3 Years: USD $1281
Total Effective Yearly Cost Estimate of above services for 3 years reserved instances = USD 427 (USD 36 monthly)

If you would like to use our service for setting up your SocialEngine based community on Amazon AWS infrastructure, or to migrate your existing SocialEngine website from a different hosting to Amazon AWS, then please order our services: "SocialEngine Setup and Installation on Amazon Cloud (AWS)" and "Speeding up your SocialEngine Website".