If you are running a service that needs to be up all the time this is ideal. For other scenarios, what you describe is probably appropriate. With burstable ins

If you are running a service that needs to be up all the time this is ideal. For other scenarios, what you describe is probably appropriate. With burstable instances, you accumulate 6 CPU credits every hour so you can run at 100% load for an hour, once per 10 hours for t2.medium (once every 13.3 hours for t2.medium; once every 15 hours for t2.micro) It would be nice to have a credit window greater than 24 hours though. EDIT: ColinCera pointed out the math is incorrect. Updated and removed erroneous conclusion.