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AWS does per-hour billing, so you definitely do not have to commit to a month for on-demand instances.
by jd007 13y ago
AWS does per-hour billing, so you definitely do not have to commit to a month for on-demand instances.
- dangrossman 13y agoI was attempting to point out that you don't need to use EC2 to get shorter than month-to-month billing these days.
- jd007 13y agoOK I see. But then why not EC2 with per-hour billing?
- kyrra 13y agoI would imagine for a lot of people, they don't need that type of granularity when spinning up and shutting down a server instance. Unless you have some automation to spin up new instances as load increases for short bursts, I could see people working on a schedule that is across a few days.
- orthecreedence 13y agoScaling up/down is usually for CPU-bound jobs. EC2 has a bad cost/CPU workload ratio when compared to a provider like Linode. You really have to bank on the hourly billing (as the article touched on) to make the cost it worthwhile.
- bad_user 13y agoThat's not necessarily true. We use ELB (Elastic Load Balancer) with an auto-scaling group behind it. The instances get added or removed based on the latency reported by CloudWatch/ELB. During the course of a day, the number of EC2 instances running can vary from 8 to 25. Usually 8 is enough, but when spikes happen or when the capacity of instances to process stuff drops (which does happen in cloud-computing, based on what neighbours you have and what they are doing), then new instances are started in a matter of minutes. And this billing by hour does save us a lot of money. Because 8 instances is enough, until it isn't and the traffic is so huge that it can choke and freeze 8 instances. Incidental, this ability is one reason we moved off Heroku.
- JoshGlazebrook 13y agoAzure bills by the minute as of today.