Originally Posted by
star_world
You only pay for bandwidth in one direction, but for a proxy server that still means you need to double the numbers.
For the regular US instances, the first 1Gb is free and then it's 12 cents per Gb after that. 24c per Gb total.
For a 1.5Mbps stream (fairly typical for HD-ish video from Netflix) that would cost about 16 cents per hour.
You are somewhat correct.
From what I understand you only pay for outbound data transfer with amazon EC2, all inbound traffic is free.
In addition, you get 15GB a month free with the free tier.
I have 4 or 5 users who use the VPN that I setup to watch netflix/hulu, and while none of us are heavy users, all of us watch at least 5 hours of TV a month (In HD as well), and I've never gone over the 15GB alottment of freee bandwidth, so I wouldn't worry about that.
So far my bill to amazon for the VPN has never been more than $2 or $3/month and those were in months where I was running torrents over the VPN and thus far exceeding the alotment for bandwidth.
From amazon's EC2 pricing page:
Data Transfer IN
All data transfer in $0.000 per GB
Data Transfer OUT
First 1 GB / month $0.000 per GB
Up to 10 TB / month $0.120 per GB
Next 40 TB / month $0.090 per GB
Next 100 TB / month $0.070 per GB
Next 350 TB / month $0.050 per GB
Here's there detailed description of the free usage tier:
Free Tier*
As part of AWS’s Free Usage Tier, new AWS customers can get started with Amazon EC2 for free. Upon sign-up, new AWS customers receive the following EC2 services each month for one year:
750 hours of EC2 running Linux/Unix Micro instance usage
750 hours of EC2 running Microsoft Windows Server Micro instance usage
750 hours of Elastic Load Balancing plus 15 GB data processing
30 GB of Amazon Elastic Block Storage (EBS) plus 2 million IOs and 1 GB snapshot storage
15 GB of bandwidth out aggregated across all AWS services
1 GB of Regional Data Transfer
------> I believe the 15GB of bandwidth out aggregated across all AWS services includes whatever your EC2 instances are running.
If anybody would like help setting up such an instance, it takes me altogether <5 minutes to setup and I'd be happy to do it for any fellow FT'ers. Feel free to PM me.
Based on my extremely rough, in head calculation, I'm going to say that 1GB of data transfer is equal to 2-3 hours of HD stream via netflix/hulu. So with your included 15GB/month I think you should be able to stream around 30-35 hours of HD a month.
Please do note though that this 'free' instance is only allowed for one year, afterwhich it wil l cost around $10/month. So I recommend terminating it after a year, creating a second amazon account, and setting up a second one at that point.
Happy Travels!