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Something similar has happened to me, on a smaller scale. I was recently checking my bank account, and noticed a charge from AWS for something like $15. After

by mhink 12y ago

Something similar has happened to me, on a smaller scale. I was recently checking my bank account, and noticed a charge from AWS for something like $15. After further investigation, I had apparently been charged this $15 for about 6 months. Hmm. Logging into AWS and checking the Cost Explorer showed that I had been charged for a t1.small EC2 instance I had running, but when I logged into the AWS console, all I saw was a single "stopped" instance. There's no way I was being charged for cycles I'm not using, right? Turns out that the instance I was being charged for was in us-west, and I had only been looking at us-east- and there is no indication within the actual EC2 panel that you have instances in other regions! I was a bit perturbed, to say the least...

fletchowns 12y ago
Not sure why you didn't click on "Billing & Cost Management" where you can see a complete breakdown (by resource and region) of exactly what you are being charged for.
- SwellJoe 12y ago
  I don't know about the previous commenter, and I don't know if the tools have improved, but when I tried to use the billing and cost management page, I couldn't figure out what was actually costing so much. It broke it down into (EC2, S3, etc.), but I couldn't figure out how that mapped out to the bill (i.e. was it the snapshots of my instances, the storage for the not running instances, the old backups in S3, etc.). It didn't seem like it was telling me "exactly" what I was being charged for. For me, when I saw a $300 bill for one running EC2 instance, a couple of halted ones, and a few hundred GB of storage for something I thought of as a "toy" project that I didn't want to invest serious time or money in, I knew I was done with AWS. A small colocated server could readily provide those resources for vastly less money (and I work on tools to manage cloud and VM resources, including a reasonably good API for spinning them up and down and such, so I don't really miss the Amazon API or UI). This was after I'd already gotten a shock from an automated backup gone wrong that ran up a huge bill. So, it took me a couple of times getting burned. Of course, it's always been my fault for not understanding how Amazon bills for things, what services cost money (i.e. a down instance still costs money), how much things cost, and sometimes how the API works (or at least confirming that it's doing what I think it's doing, in the case of removing old backups). I'm not blaming Amazon. I'm just saying, I don't trust myself to use Amazon for anything that I'm not going to spend a lot of time and energy on, because I'm obviously not capable of using it without making mistakes when I treat it like a toy. I readily admit I shot myself in the foot; Amazon just provided the guns.
  - bjt 12y ago
    The whole billing/cost section got big improvements last year.
thoman23 12y ago
Almost the exact same story here. I never thought to change the region to see what was causing a $3 charge every month, and at $3 I didn't have the energy to investigate further until about a year of needling frustration built up and I reached out to Amazon support directly and they clued me in. Years later I'm using AWS professionally, and it all seems easy now. But when you are first introduced to AWS and want to kick the tires on a toy project, it can be confusing and overwhelming.
billyhoffman 12y ago
+1 on this. I have several instances running in US East and Ireland. When you login it just shows the instances for 1 region (usually us-east) and I have a quick "oh shit" moment wondering what happened to the Ireland servers. The AWAS EC2 console really needs a way to show all instances.

by mhink 12y ago

fletchowns 12y ago

Not sure why you didn't click on "Billing & Cost Management" where you can see a complete breakdown (by resource and region) of exactly what you are being charged for.

SwellJoe 12y ago
I don't know about the previous commenter, and I don't know if the tools have improved, but when I tried to use the billing and cost management page, I couldn't figure out what was actually costing so much. It broke it down into (EC2, S3, etc.), but I couldn't figure out how that mapped out to the bill (i.e. was it the snapshots of my instances, the storage for the not running instances, the old backups in S3, etc.). It didn't seem like it was telling me "exactly" what I was being charged for. For me, when I saw a $300 bill for one running EC2 instance, a couple of halted ones, and a few hundred GB of storage for something I thought of as a "toy" project that I didn't want to invest serious time or money in, I knew I was done with AWS. A small colocated server could readily provide those resources for vastly less money (and I work on tools to manage cloud and VM resources, including a reasonably good API for spinning them up and down and such, so I don't really miss the Amazon API or UI). This was after I'd already gotten a shock from an automated backup gone wrong that ran up a huge bill. So, it took me a couple of times getting burned. Of course, it's always been my fault for not understanding how Amazon bills for things, what services cost money (i.e. a down instance still costs money), how much things cost, and sometimes how the API works (or at least confirming that it's doing what I think it's doing, in the case of removing old backups). I'm not blaming Amazon. I'm just saying, I don't trust myself to use Amazon for anything that I'm not going to spend a lot of time and energy on, because I'm obviously not capable of using it without making mistakes when I treat it like a toy. I readily admit I shot myself in the foot; Amazon just provided the guns.
- bjt 12y ago
  The whole billing/cost section got big improvements last year.

thoman23 12y ago

Almost the exact same story here. I never thought to change the region to see what was causing a $3 charge every month, and at $3 I didn't have the energy to investigate further until about a year of needling frustration built up and I reached out to Amazon support directly and they clued me in. Years later I'm using AWS professionally, and it all seems easy now. But when you are first introduced to AWS and want to kick the tires on a toy project, it can be confusing and overwhelming.

billyhoffman 12y ago

+1 on this. I have several instances running in US East and Ireland. When you login it just shows the instances for 1 region (usually us-east) and I have a quick "oh shit" moment wondering what happened to the Ireland servers. The AWAS EC2 console really needs a way to show all instances.