A Small Business Guide to AWS: What You Actually Need

AWS has over 200 services. If you've ever opened the AWS console and felt your eyes glaze over, you're not alone. The good news: a typical small business uses maybe 6–10 of them. The rest are for enterprises with teams of cloud engineers. Here's a plain-English guide to the ones that actually matter for you.

The two patterns that cover 90% of small businesses

Pattern 1: Static website (marketing site, portfolio, landing pages)

If your site is HTML, CSS, and JavaScript with no backend logic, you need exactly three services:

• S3 — stores your files (HTML, CSS, images). Think of it as a hard drive in the cloud. Costs pennies per month for a typical website.
• CloudFront — a CDN (content delivery network) that serves your files from the nearest data center to each visitor. Makes your site fast everywhere and handles HTTPS. Usually $1–3/month for low traffic.
• Route 53 — DNS. Points your domain name (yourbusiness.com) at CloudFront. About $0.50/month per domain.

Total monthly cost: $2–5 for a typical small business website. That's not a typo.

Pattern 2: Web application (SaaS, booking system, dashboard, API)

If your product has a backend — user accounts, a database, business logic — the stack gets a bit bigger:

• ECS Fargate — runs your application in containers without you managing servers. You define what your app needs (CPU, memory) and AWS handles the rest. This is what we use for most client projects.
• ALB (Application Load Balancer) — routes traffic to your containers and handles HTTPS termination. About $16–20/month as a base cost.
• ECR — stores your Docker images (the packaged version of your application). Negligible cost.
• RDS or DynamoDB — your database. RDS is traditional SQL (PostgreSQL, MySQL); DynamoDB is NoSQL. For small apps, you can also use SQLite on EFS (a shared file system) to avoid database costs entirely.
• SSM Parameter Store — stores your secrets (API keys, database passwords) securely. Free for standard parameters.

Total monthly cost: $30–80 for a small application with light traffic. Scales up as traffic grows, but you're paying for what you use.

Services you'll hear about but probably don't need

EC2

Virtual servers you manage yourself. This was the original AWS service and it's still everywhere in tutorials. For most small businesses, ECS Fargate is a better choice — you don't have to patch operating systems, manage SSH keys, or worry about server capacity. EC2 makes sense if you need very specific configurations or are running something that doesn't containerize well.

Lambda

Serverless functions that run on demand. Great for small, event-driven tasks (process an uploaded file, handle a webhook, run a scheduled job). Not great as the foundation for a full web application — the cold start times and execution limits make it awkward for anything complex. We use Lambda for specific tasks alongside ECS, not instead of it.

Amplify

AWS's "easy mode" for web apps. It's fine for prototypes and personal projects, but it abstracts away too much for production business software. When something goes wrong (and it will), you need to understand what's underneath. We'd rather set up the real services and know exactly what we're running.

Elastic Beanstalk

A managed platform that deploys your code to EC2 instances. It was useful five years ago; today, ECS Fargate does the same thing with less overhead and more control.

The services everyone needs (regardless of pattern)

ACM (Certificate Manager)

Free SSL certificates for your domains. HTTPS is non-negotiable in 2026 — browsers flag non-HTTPS sites as insecure, and Google penalizes them in search rankings. ACM makes this free and automatic.

IAM (Identity and Access Management)

Controls who can do what in your AWS account. This is the security foundation. Set it up properly from day one — don't use your root account for daily work, create separate users with limited permissions, and enable MFA (multi-factor authentication).

CloudWatch

Monitoring and logs. When your app throws an error at 2 AM, CloudWatch is where you find out what happened. Basic monitoring is included free; detailed metrics and alarms cost a few dollars a month.

AWS Budgets

Set a spending alert so you never get a surprise bill. This is free and should be the first thing you configure. Set an alert at your expected monthly spend plus 20%, and you'll sleep better.

What AWS costs in practice

Here's what our actual clients pay monthly:

• Marketing website: $2–5/month
• Small SaaS app (under 1,000 users): $40–80/month
• Medium SaaS app (1,000–10,000 users): $100–300/month
• AI-powered application with API costs: $50–150/month for infrastructure, plus API usage

The biggest surprise for most small business owners: AWS is cheaper than they expected. The second biggest surprise: the bill is confusing. AWS billing is notoriously granular — you'll see line items for individual API calls, data transfer per GB, and storage per hour. AWS Budgets and the Cost Explorer help make sense of it.

How to avoid common mistakes

1. Don't leave things running. A test database or unused load balancer can quietly cost $20–50/month. Clean up after experiments.
2. Use infrastructure as code. Define your setup in CloudFormation or Terraform so you can recreate it, review it, and tear it down cleanly. Never click through the console to set up production infrastructure.
3. Start small. You can always scale up. Starting with the biggest instance "just in case" is the most common way small businesses overspend on AWS.
4. Set up billing alerts immediately. Before you deploy anything else.

Should you manage AWS yourself?

If you're technical and enjoy infrastructure, absolutely. AWS documentation is excellent and the free tier gives you a year to learn. If you'd rather focus on your business and have someone else handle the cloud, that's what our Cloud & DevOps service is for — we set it up, deploy your app, and keep it running.