So, currently I’ve been running on a t1.micro on-demand instance for my three blogs (yeah, I keep the topics distinct, since cooking, programming, and generallized life, don’t really have the same audiences; between the three of them I probably make one-two posts a week when I’m remembering to write anything)
Anyway, I’ve been using that setup b/c it’s inside the AWS free-tier ; but with the problems I’ve had recently (see last post), I’m not sure if it’s the on-demand-iness, the micro’s virtual disk instead of an s3 distributed drive backing (my money is on the on-demand bit).
So I’ve been looking at the prices. I looked first at the low-utilization micro instance, since I really don’t see enough traffic to qualify as “high utilization,” but apparently in AWS-speak, utilization is “how much would this system be online.” Since the blog/sites would be on all the time, that’s “high utilization”
Current prices are on-demand at 2c/hr, so 1yr is 175$
Light Reserved is 23$ registratoin and 1.2c/hr, total 130$
Heavy utilization is 62$ and .5c/hr, 105$
To go up to a standard small (instead of micro) for the s3 backing:
on demand – 8.5c/hr, 745$
light – 98$ & 5c/hr, 535$
heavy – 276$ & 2c/hr, 450$
So … yeah, apparently it’s not quite as cheap as I was thinking for the year on AWS, but even if I split out across three instances for the various bits (my blogs, a couple sites we host, and a forum we run) it’d be ~300$/yr, opposed to currently we pay ~80$/mo on the business internet to run those things . Still a net-savings of 400$ give or take. And a massively higher throughput ; Not to mention that we can upgrade our home network from 1.5/1.5 business to probably 25/5 and STILL save 50$ a month 
(there’s more on that bill, so I’m not sure which parts exactly would be removed, but I’m sure it’s more than the 300$ I’d be paying on the new structure)
So, there will likely be some flickering as I move to the reserved instance in the next month or so; I’m really hoping it helps the occasional choke-out I’m seeing. If not, then I will DEFINITELY be putting in a support question