I've got some very small mail servers for clients (most are less than 20 GB total set) on some t3a nano's. I'm paying through the nose at 10 cents per GB per month for gp2 drives. I know I should downgrade those to the 8 cents per GB gp3's at a minumum. But what about the other offerings? I'm confused by storage vs. throughput and IOPS. I have no idea what volume type is best-suited for a very low volume server.
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GP3 is best for boot volumes. The HDD volumes aren't supported as boot volumes.
If you want a separate data volume for the email you could try "Throughput Optimized HDD" or "Cold HDD". The latency and throughput will be significantly worse than GP3 but shouldn't make much difference for an email server. That would take your price from $0.08/GB to $0.04 or $0.015, but you'd want to benchmark it. If you moved 10GB from GP3 to "Cold HDD" you would save $0.60 per month, so it may not be worth the bother. You should be charging enough for your services that you cover these costs anyway.
You should of course make sure you have snapshots or other backups regardless of the volume type.
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Tim
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I forgot to mention that these servers run roundcube, the web-based email client. Do you think the volume type will make any discernable difference in speed of that service? – StevieD Feb 24 '21 at 02:33
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Web interface does make a difference. I guess it depends how Roundcube works, hitting the disk to look at messages or looking at an index. I suspect low latency disk would be better, for the sake of 60c per month I wouldn't bother personally. You can probably save more with a savings plan, trimming storage elsewhere like limiting snapshots, etc. – Tim Feb 24 '21 at 03:30