Running Ubuntu 9.10 under Amazon's Elastic Cloud
Written for byobu by Dustin Kirkland on 2010-02-01
How Can I Figure My Costs, Exactly?
It's rather tough to nail down cost for an EC2 instance, as it depends on things like bandwidth. However, there is a small dashboard-like application you can install that can help you track your costs. The package byobu (formerly known as screen-profiles) can help. After apt-getting byobu and running byobu, you'll get a screen session with a small two-line dashboard at the bottom of your terminal window. To add the EC2 information, press the F9 key to bring up the byobu menu, select Toggle Status Notifications, then select the ec2_cost notifier, and press Apply. Then you'll have a neat little running total of the approximate cost for your EC2 instance, as shown in Figure 2. You can see this particular run cost me 40 cents! Byobu has all kinds of other useful little widgets too; check it out if you do a lot of management via a terminal.
