> EC2 prices are a bad benchmark

In general, reserved instance prices are a better number for "cheapest way to run a thing on AWS.

I find https://instances.vantage.sh/ is a good way to look for the pricing info.

It says an x2gd.xlarge in us-east-1 has 64gb ram and costs $72 USD/mo (on a 3 year reservation paid up-front).

Thanks! I’ve been using OSMs free Nominatim for testing but need to move off it to support a higher query volume - I had no idea it was going to be so expensive, so this comes at the perfect time!

There are ways to make it work on a budget, but with Nominatim you do need 64GB of physical memory at a minimum for the planet. Some of the other replies in this thread have offered resources on how to find that for cheap. My go-to for this is hetzner but I'm super curious if there's anything west of the atlantic that compares because the latency going to Finland is brutal, even with mosh instead of ssh.

Good luck! Don't use Airmail in prod (yet?), if that thought crossed your mind. It's just a demo for now and that's probably how it should stay for a while longer :)

You can set it up off AWS. A 64GB RAM server would cost you $16/mo.

https://serverhunter.com is amazing