Dears, I'm trying FMCloud but since there is not free trial version for FMC, I'm working with the $0.99/hour option from AWS market place. The question is, how does AWS measure that hour? Is it per hour of usage from any of the 5 users allowed in the license? or is it per hours of created instance? I just want to be sure that in a working day, I'll be charged $7.92 (per 8 hours of usage), and not $23.76 (per 24 hours of instance lifetime).
Thanks a lot!
Hello,
There are two types of billing with AWS. There is hourly and Annually. Hours is, without a doubt 24/7 charging while the instance is running. You can stop the instance in the EC2 console. It won't delete anything, but it will not be active. So no one will be able to access it will it is stopped. Once you start it up again, in the EC2 console, everyone can connect, but charges will start back up.
Annual is like BYOL with Cloud, but with a major difference. If you were to sign up for AWS Annual Cloud with a pre setup instance type, take t2.medium for example, and then change the type, you will be switched from Annual to Hourly. It's a weird AWS thing where if you sign up for an Annual, you are stuck with that instance Type.
This is why I recommend BYOL. You get the server from us, you can change the instance type without the Annual payment getting changed. And if you decide you don't want to use Cloud anymore, you can cancel the Cloud setup, get the License Key back and start up your own Server.
There are pros and cons for everything, but I hope this flushes it out a bit more.
TSPlatypus
FileMaker, Inc.
FileMaker Cloud on-demand pricing is really only for short term needs and evaluating the product. EC2 charges are incurred on running instances for compute time. That means that if the server is running, you are charged.
There are also ongoing costs regardless if the instance is running or not, like EBS and snapshots. Those are volumes and backups. Volumes depend on how big you made them and backups will be variable depending on the size of your data and how often it changes.
Make sure when you are done evaluating, if you do not use FM Cloud, terminate the instance and make sure the volumes and snapshots are deleted as well.
You will be charged for 24 hours unless you shut down the instance. I'm not sure if you can shut down a FileMaker Cloud instance without deleting your data. If you can, you'll still be billed for the EBS volumes while the instance is shut down.