Cost Analysis

RDS / DBA Cost reference to help you evaluate the costs of self-hosting database
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Cost Reference

EC2 vCPU-Month RDS vCPU-Month
DHH’s self-hosted core-month price (192C 384G) 25.32 Junior open-source DBA reference salary 15K/person-month
IDC self-hosted data center (exclusive physical machine: 64C384G) 19.53 Intermediate open-source DBA reference salary 30K/person-month
IDC self-hosted data center (container, oversold 500%) 7 Senior open-source DBA reference salary 60K/person-month
UCloud Elastic Virtual Machine (8C16G, oversold) 25 ORACLE database license 10000
Alibaba Cloud Elastic Server 2x memory (exclusive without overselling) 107 Alibaba Cloud RDS PG 2x memory (exclusive) 260
Alibaba Cloud Elastic Server 4x memory (exclusive without overselling) 138 Alibaba Cloud RDS PG 4x memory (exclusive) 320
Alibaba Cloud Elastic Server 8x memory (exclusive without overselling) 180 Alibaba Cloud RDS PG 8x memory (exclusive) 410
AWS C5D.METAL 96C 200G (monthly without upfront) 100 AWS RDS PostgreSQL db.T2 (2x) 440

For instance, using RDS for PostgreSQL on AWS, the price for a 64C / 256GB db.m5.16xlarge RDS for one month is $25,817, which is equivalent to about 180,000 yuan per month. The monthly rent is enough for you to buy two servers with even better performance and set them up on your own. The rent-to-buy ratio doesn’t even last a month; renting for just over ten days is enough to buy the whole server for yourself.

Payment Model Price Cost Per Year (¥10k)
Self-hosted IDC (Single Physical Server) ¥75k / 5 years 1.5
Self-hosted IDC (2-3 Server HA Cluster) ¥150k / 5 years 3.0 ~ 4.5
Alibaba Cloud RDS (On-demand) ¥87.36/hour 76.5
Alibaba Cloud RDS (Monthly) ¥42k / month 50
Alibaba Cloud RDS (Yearly, 15% off) ¥425,095 / year 42.5
Alibaba Cloud RDS (3-year, 50% off) ¥750,168 / 3 years 25
AWS (On-demand) $25,817 / month 217
AWS (1-year, no upfront) $22,827 / month 191.7
AWS (3-year, full upfront) $120k + $17.5k/month 175
AWS China/Ningxia (On-demand) ¥197,489 / month 237
AWS China/Ningxia (1-year, no upfront) ¥143,176 / month 171
AWS China/Ningxia (3-year, full upfront) ¥647k + ¥116k/month 160.6

Comparing the costs of self-hosting versus using a cloud database:

Method Cost Per Year (¥10k)
Self-hosted Servers 64C / 384G / 3.2TB NVME SSD 660K IOPS (2-3 servers) 3.0 ~ 4.5
Alibaba Cloud RDS PG High-Availability pg.x4m.8xlarge.2c, 64C / 256GB / 3.2TB ESSD PL3 25 ~ 50
AWS RDS PG High-Availability db.m5.16xlarge, 64C / 256GB / 3.2TB io1 x 80k IOPS 160 ~ 217

Cloud Exit Column


Last modified 2024-02-29: update content (34b2b75d)