EC2 was billed by the hour initially. Minimum one hour charge as soon as you started an instance. It was still better than the alternatives; nobody else had per

EC2 was billed by the hour initially. Minimum one hour charge as soon as you started an instance. It was still better than the alternatives; nobody else had per-hour billing with no commitments in 2006. Moving to per-second billing was a much later change (in 2017).