I don't want to pay too much and I thought about AWS but I never used AWS.
Who has already tried AWS (no matter if it's for Minecraft or Laravel).
I have a question : the prices are displayed per hour. What does this mean ? I only pay when I really use the server when I connect on it to play ? Or do I pay for a full subscription 24 hours per day ?
I mean if my son plays for example 1 h per week, I have to pay only 1 h per week, so 52 h per year ?
You will pay whilst it is up. It would be ideal if you could define a schedule and start and stop the server in certain hours.
This might be possible with something like github actions that can be run against a schedule.
Other VPS solutions like Linode and Digital Ocean ask you to pay for the provisioned droplet irrespective of whether it is actually spun up at the time.
AWS charges you as long as the instance is running, so the trick is to spin up a small EC2 box and stop it when your kid’s done playing. I’ve also saved a bit by grabbing cheap game keys on cdkeysforgames.com, which helped keep our little home setup affordable. A t2.small or t3.small usually handles a few friends just fine.