I would like to create a high-available setup (e.g. a small cluster) for a webserver, i.e. it will run Apache, PHP and MySQL.

There will be between 2-8 small websites running with only very little traffic and workload. High availability is however very important.

I don't want to be dependent on 1 datacenter, so there must be a minimum of 2 servers placed in different datacenters, and if one server goes down, the user must experience no or only a minimum of downtime - and no data loss.

I have considered Amazon AWS using their Elastic Load Balancing, since it is possible to buy 2 EC2 instances in 2 availability zones and set up load balancing and RDS (Multi-AZ).

However this seems rather expensive. Using the AWS price calculator http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/calc5.html it totals to 185$/month the first year (including the free tier).

Are my calculations incorrect or is there a cheaper way to make this HA setup?

Best regards