Why I am Running Pi-hole on AWS EC2
It is really cheap.
I know, AWS get a bad rap. We always see articles about how its constantly down, there are latency issues, and that when US East goes down, half the internet goes down along with it.
Aside from all the complaints, AWS EC2 is cost effective, easy to use, and is very secure.
I decided to switch my pihole instances over from my homelab server to two EC2 micro instances. These little guys have 1GB of RAM and 1CPU. Pihole really only needs 512MB of RAM and does not need a whole CPU.
The two selling points that finally won me over were:
The cost is crazy cheap. - After doing the math, a month of using these two instances will only cost me exactly 13.71 USD (not taking advantage of some free tier stuff).
I can now take my server down without DNS going down too. - This was actually a big issue since I would have to schedule internet downtimes with the (not so happy) users on my home network whenever I wanted to turn the server off.
In terms of security, the AWS VPC security rules allow me to only allow traffic from my home IP to ports 22 and 53 on the pihole instances. No one can get in, except me, and no one can use my pihole from outside my home network.
With such a cheap compute option available to me, I am seriously thinking about selling my home server.
Thats all for today,
Joe