Disclosure: I work on SEO for HostItWorks, and while working on SEO tasks, I explored its AWS Cost Calculator. I’m sharing what I learned about estimating cloud costs and planning AWS infrastructure. You can also compare your estimates with the official AWS Pricing Calculator.

What a Simple AWS Calculator Does

The HostItWorks AWS cost calculator is a browser-based estimator. You can:

Turn services on or off. EC2, RDS, S3, CloudFront, Route 53, SES, Lambda, and ElastiCache are available.

Adjust usage inputs for each enabled service, such as instance type, hours per day, storage size, request counts, and data transfer.

See a cost per service , then a combined monthly estimate and an annual estimate .

Copy the estimate to paste into a doc or proposal, or reset everything and start over.

Its footnote states that estimates are based on us-east-1 (US East, N. Virginia) On-Demand pricing , and that actual bills depend on usage patterns, reserved instances, Savings Plans, and data transfer.…