aws web hosting cost explained for beginners

What actually drives your bill

AWS uses pay-as-you-go pricing, so your total depends on what you run and how long it runs. Hosting a simple site can be cheap, while a high-traffic app with databases and CDN can scale costs quickly.

• Compute: EC2 or Lightsail size, hours, and autoscaling behavior.
• Storage: S3 or EBS capacity, storage class, and retrieval patterns.
• Data transfer: traffic out to the internet and across regions.
• Database: RDS engine, instance class, backups, and I/O.
• Edge and balancing: CloudFront, load balancers, and DNS queries.

Beginner tips to estimate and save

Start with the AWS Pricing Calculator to model expected traffic, storage, and uptime. Use the Free Tier for experiments, then set Budgets and billing alerts so surprises don’t slip in.

When you go live, right-size instances, turn off idle dev resources, enable lifecycle policies on S3, and consider Savings Plans, Reserved Instances, or Spot for steady or flexible workloads. Caching, compression, and a CDN can reduce transfer and compute, often saving more than they cost.