title: Capacity planning and estimating costs with Amazon Web Services for 1M users
body: <p>I'm in the planning stages of estimating server costs for my web application. How can I determine how many Amazon EC2 instances will I need to handle a database backed web application with 1M active users?  How should I go about filling out this monthly calculator on Amazon's site?</p>
  
  <p><a href="http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/calc5.html" rel="nofollow">http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/calc5.html</a></p>
  
  <p>The web application will be somewhat akin to a social networking site.  There will be most likely small, but anywhere from 100,000 to 500,000 data transfers from users to the servers on a daily basis.</p>