What level of SQL Server licensing are you looking to replicate on AWS?  Pricing varies depending on whether you are running SQL Express, SQL Web or SQL Standard.  You can use the RDS pricing page to get a good comparison.

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Joe Brinkman
DNN Corp.

As I'm sure you know, the sheer variety of needs for web based installations makes quoting any price/setup a futile effort. I've been running DNNDev.com on AWS for years without a hitch. Unless you have a specific need for SQL Standard, I'd go with SQL Web for cost reasons. Of course, AWS has a BYOL option too that you could investigate if you already have a license.

The next question is whether you need to run your SQL on a separate box or boxes or whether you can run it on the same box as your web server. That would depend largely on your use case and would determine if you would be better off with RDS.

One thing I would highly recommend is getting a Reserved Instance, but do the calculations as there are certain pricing sweet spots - depending on instance type and resource utilization (light vs medium vs heavy). M3 instance types tend to be a good-for-most-situations instance. C3 is a good option if you will be doing more processing on the server. Of course those are web servers and not DB servers.

Most of the extra charges on AWS I've found to be pretty minor. Storage is cheap. Bandwidth you'd have to pay for regardless of where you hosted (either the price is built-in to your fee or you pay separately). However, a lot of internal traffic within the same Availability Zones is free so you can minimize costs there as well.

Everything depends on the specifics of your situation but if I were to hazard a guess, I'd offer that a well-managed AWS setup is probably cheaper overall than rolling your own in-house - especially if you think about on-going maintenance, upgrades, staffing, etc.

HTH,
Kelly

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