UPDATE POST RDS trial: OH NO: RDS has no sysadmin rights and the app I need has Stored Procs that need that. So I installed an EC2 instance which is a fancy way of saying “got a computer up and running, logging into it using RDP and installing my own SQL express”. Gee I could have done that in the first place 🙂 Alas. BUT … a super cool article with how-to’s for both RDS and EC2 setup. A CLI is also avail. Firewall calc.

After doing some digging, AWS is likely a good value for a SQL server. It is called AWS RDS. It can be sized and all sorts of databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL, MS SQL Server etc) can be chosen and the power of the machine and file size can be chosen. $20-$100 for 20GB of space. But that is not all you have to think of when sizing up the machine. Here is an RDS matrix.