How to Reduce AWS Hosting Costs with A51

How to reduce AWS costs with A51 and aMiSTACX

All of us want to reduce our AWS daily operational costs. Right? Without impacting services, or getting to a state of paranoia for just touching anything in the AWS console.

Here are real proven ways to reduce your AWS Operational Costs:

  • Use aMiSTACX – Using any of aMiSTACX server stacks can help reduce costs, because they are optimized for performance. In turn, this means you probably can run a smaller instance or even a Free Tier t3-micro. Additionally, many of our CMS stacks come with performance plugins/modules that extend the performance capabilities of the stack. [All included in the pricing.] Why pay hundreds of dollars for plugins that just don’t work, or require constant support renewal contracts?
  • Power Cycles w/ A51 – Using the A51 Management dashboard by aMiSTACX can help reduce costs in many ways. Why pay for EC2 or RDS instances when not in use? Setting power cycles by schedule can greatly reduce costs.  With A51 you can not only schedule your power for instances On/Off, but you can also enjoy instant on-demand power cycling. This one feature can significantly reduce your AWS bill! Did you know? All RDS instances when stopped will restart in 7 days! That A51 can send you an alert to your phone, and you can instantly power the RDS back down from your phone, or even better enable our RDS Sleep Mode feature to have it done automatically. Enough to save you $$$ 😉
  • A51 Teams – Making use of A51 teams can reduce costs through greater efficiency of resource management. How? For example, say you have a developer or developers that need access to a Development server at 1am, and they only plan to work on the EC2/RDS for let’s say an hour and a half. Does this mean the server has to run continuously? No! With A51 and teams, you allow your developer(s) to power On and power Off the instance(s) on-demand. All without the complexity of AWS IAM assignment. As a bonus, you can even set an SMS alert to notify you when there is a power up or power down event.
  • A51 Resource Monitoring – A51 allows you to view all of your AWS resources globally, and you can view multiple AWS accounts with one click. Instantly identify the number of instances running or stopped. Get quick dashboard metrics on CPU and Network activity. Get SMS and desktop notifications on instance states. All-in-all command and control over your entire AWS empire.
  • SMS & Email Reports – Get a summary of all your powered instances to your email or sms device as many times during the day as you can handle. This is a great way to keep track of power usage.
  • CDN – Effective use of a CDN can reduce workloads on servers, and shift caching from server-centric to cloud-centric. All our our stacks at aMiSTACX are designed to leverage Cloud-Centric caching, and not use older server level caching technologies. With caching at the DNS edge, this reduces the requirement for larger EC2 and RDS instances – all saving you money per hour of operational use.
  • AWS Auto Scale Groups – For large ecommerce or transactional traffic organizations that use a CMS like WordPress or Magento, the ability to use aMiSTACX to put these CMSs in a stateless configuration is almost entirely turnkey. With AWS auto scale groups you can scale horizontally on load, and scale-out. Thus removing the requirement to run a big fat server 24/7/365. Just size accordingly to your needs, and have auto scaling handle the capacity for spikes.
  • Reduction of Management Licenses – A51 can take the place of many server-centric types of management panels such as CPANEL, Webmin, and Plesk. Thus reducing the operational cost per server. Additionally, since A51 includes backup management functions, you may also feel other costly web based backup services are no longer required. A51 is included with all aMiSTACX servers and you can manage non-aMiSTACX EC2s.
  • Mobile Management – A51 was designed to be mobile friendly. All of the desktop functions can also be handled on mobile, and all without the requirement of an app. [No Big Brother App store!] This means emergency response can technically be performed by the main account holder, or via the Team Assignment feature. For example, set SMS to alert an on-call tech(s) when a server goes down.
  • Bonus! Disaster Recovery – Many articles that discuss reduction of AWS costs omit the disaster recovery costs associated with down time. What good is penny-pinching if you suffer an outage? How long will it take to get back up and running? With A51 alerting, auto scale groups, and/or aMiSTACX high availability options, everything is designed to make disaster recovery seamless.How could you manage your AWS footprint if your AWS console account was unavailable? Think this doesn’t happen? It does! How much money would that cost your business or organization? With our A51 Management Dashboard we offer an AWS console external backup that runs with programmatic access built upon IAM roles. Thus, even if your main account is locked out, you still can manage your AWS resources. A real lifesaver!
  • Mirror Sites – Send copies of backups to designated AWS region/zones. In case SHTF, you have all of your backups in another region for emergency restore.
  • Reserved Instances – Yes, AWS offers you a way to reduce your hosting costs over time. Save up to 75%!

Video shows quick overview of A51 usage.

Overall aMiSTACX and A51 will help you manage and hopefully reduce your AWS operational costs.

Continue to Part II of How to Reduce AWS Costs >>

~ Lead_Robot

Weaponize your Business with aMiSTACX!