Running a small Magento shop on AWS in Frankfurt costs from about USD 204 to about USD 804 a month, according to AWS price lists as of 12 October 2026. Where you land depends on how many services you hand to AWS and whether you pay for a standby in a second zone. On shared hosting, Magento 2.4 usually won't even install, because it needs a search engine that cheap plans don't include.
I assumed a shop with up to about 10,000 products and about 30 people browsing at once, with most pages served from the Varnish cache, so 4 vCPU and 16 GB of RAM in total are enough.
Magento 2.4 needs a separate search engine
Since Magento 2.4, Adobe requires Elasticsearch or OpenSearch in every installation. For the latest release, 2.4.9, the system requirements table lists only OpenSearch 3.
Hostinger's help centre says Elasticsearch isn't available on its web and cloud plans, so Magento 2 needs a VPS. A Hostinger VPS for Magento with 4 vCPU and 16 GB of RAM costs about USD 29 a month after the promotional period, according to its price list on 14 October 2026.
On a VPS you administer the system, the database and OpenSearch yourself, and keep a backup off the server. My post on Hetzner or AWS for a small company covers how much work that is.
Three versions of the same shop on AWS
I priced all three at on-demand rates before VAT, in Frankfurt, with 200 GB of data transfer out to the internet a month.
- A single EC2 server with 4 vCPU and 16 GB of RAM runs the whole shop, database and search engine included, for about USD 204. In practice it is a VPS inside AWS, so when that machine goes down, the shop stops.
- For about USD 428, the application gets a smaller server, and the database, cache and search engine move to managed AWS services. All of it runs in one Availability Zone, one of three separate groups of data centres in the Frankfurt region, so there is still nothing to fail over to.
- The version with standby has two application servers behind a load balancer, a database with a standby copy in a second zone, two cache nodes, and images in S3 served through a CDN. It costs about USD 804. Only search stays on one node in one zone, so if it fails, category pages and search stop.
The chart for this part is in the original post.
The calculator shows a similar setup under the “Web application, shop or CMS” profile, next to Hetzner and OVH prices.
A second zone nearly doubles the bill
The database adds the most. RDS Multi-AZ keeps a standby instance in another zone and fails the database over to it when the primary stops working. AWS charges twice the single-zone rate for both the instance and its storage.
The Magento shop I moved to AWS runs on similar services: RDS MySQL, OpenSearch, Redis, Varnish and a CDN. Its hosting bill is higher than before the move, because the shop had to hold up through campaign traffic peaks and recover quickly from a failure.
What it means for a small shop
If the shop sells evenly all year and can live with a few hours of downtime after a server failure, a VPS or a Magento hosting plan with OpenSearch is enough.
For a shop that makes its money in campaigns and can't go down while they run, I recommend the third version. In the second version you pay for managed services, yet when its only application server or database fails, the shop goes offline.
Before you choose the third version, open the sales report in the Magento admin and work out the revenue per hour on the best day of your last campaign. Multiply it by the hours a server failure would keep the shop down. Compare that with what the third version would cost you extra over a year: the gap between about USD 804 and your current monthly hosting bill, times twelve. If one outage costs you more, the standby pays for itself even with one failure a year.
Originally published on codelevel.pl. Prices are net, for businesses. AWS, Hetzner and OVH are trademarks of their owners; CODELEVEL is not a partner, reseller or representative of any of them.
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