When first researching Amazon web services and their Elastic Compute Cloud, the main thing I wanted to see was a real world example of the costs involved. As Amazon use pay as you go billing, it can be difficult to try and actually project monthly costs compared to more traditional providers. After seven months of using the service with varying levels of cpu, storage and bandwidth usage here is a typical example of the costs you can expect to pay over a month when using a High CPU Windows server in the EU region.

Amazon EC2 running Windows (High-CPU Medium) = $220.00
177GB of Amazon EC2 Bandwidth = $30.00
36GB of Amazon EC2 EBS (including snapshots) = $4.50
Amazon CloudWatch = $18.00
15GB of Amazon Simple Storage Service = $2.20

Approx. = $275 per month (+ tax)

This provides a pretty sweet server with the ability to instantly snapshot the EBS data at any time. Once initially configured and installed you can bundle and boot as many of these servers as you need and only pay for the hours you need them (to cater for traffic spikes etc) and the data pipe is very fast with quality bandwidth on demand.

As with any dedicated, managed or co-lo server you'll need to also factor in costs for other services and licenses required, such as secondary dns, ftp, mail, ssl, stats, monitoring and all the manpower hours required to set all this up and administrate and maintain it on a monthly basis.

I'd be happy to answer any questions on Amazon EC2 based on experience gained so far, just leave a comment below ...

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