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Have I been shafted by Amazon EC2
asterisk14
Member
I am meant to be on the free tier free tier, but have been billed. I live in the UK and initially set up a server in Ireland. But then shut this server down and started on up in the USA as they had a few AMI's over there I wanted to use. It seems I have been billed for the USA usage but the EU one has been free.
Does anyone know what is going on here? I thought the instance was free where ever you wanted it?
Comments
Nah, you've used 29GB/mth in Ireland for the EBS free tier, and then they've allotted 1GB from the US. Beyond that, you are over the tier and hence you pay for the excess EBS storage and requests.
EBS free tier allows: 30GB/month, 2mil IOs.
They said it in the details for the free Teir you get so much usage of each rescourse per month, my bill is like 30 cents a month.
I wouldnt think 1.3 $ is such a problem, but I heard of some ppl that had to pay a lot more due to "forgetting" about it...
I doubt you'll face any bill collector problems over a $1.30 bill
Put simply, Amazon "free tier" sucks, and now you know exactly why.
They require your credit card information to sign up.
They got my credit card, I'm not fussed about the amount, it's only $1.30 but just doesn't look right how I have been charged.
The server was totally idle, so I don't understand the charge for the I/O requests as well as the EBS storage, as we are meant to get 30GB under the free tier.
Put it this way, better you cought it now than like me getting charged $50 for having nginx with a small traffic'd website for a month.
Never bothered, I used a pre-paid card so not sure if it still even exists to refund to. Just happened that I had enough for them to charge the card.
I would first post to support forums, so that they would explain you when and how did you trespassed the free tier quotas.
What was the instance used for? The I/O amount for EBS volume is high. I have an EC2 instance at AWS, with EBS volume attached. Instance runs Subversion and performs certain rather disk-busy operations on daily basis.
However, my monthly EBS I/O count was, in July, 443,202 operations. Your count is 2,789,913 operations. So, could you describe what was the volume mentioned in the account activity report you've shown used for?
Also some operating systems you install on the VPS are not free. We got a bill of $25 first month and we have not used it even for a second
. The support was great and they voided the bill.
The EC2 was running windows server 2008 base 32 bit (which is available on the free tier) and was idleing. Nothing else was running at all! That is why I was really surprised when I saw this invoice.
I suspect it did some updates, windows does that.
It's been doing something monstrous, then. I have run Windows 2008 instances as well, and never saw such a tremendous I/O count as a result of mere updates applied.
I still suggest posting to AWS forums (as a matter of fact, the only useful free option) and asking them what could be the result of such a high I/O counts).
I guess you didn't disabled auto-defragmenter, auto-indexer, defender and superfetch before you let this windows server OS idle around without shutting it down? A OS very seldomly idles, especially not a server OS and especially not a plain windows server OS without modifications.
$1? Probably spent more time and energy on this thread lol
Not about the money.
I may post on the forum, but really I just wanted to warn other people. I don't know what could have caused it, if it was updates then other people could be affected. So on second thoughts I may as well post to the forum and see what the the response is.
A service pack can be pretty heavy in io.
Well, I use AWS services for quite a time. I keep a Micro instance there. Along with some gigabytes stored on their S3, and some other services (Route 53, SNS, CloudFront etc, it costs me 5-7$ monthly.
So far, I haven't encountered cases (regarding my experience) when AWS would charge me beyond what I was actually used. **it happens, we all know, and mistakes are made. This is why I suggest demanding explanation on their forums.
There's once I tried to reinstall CentOS 3 times, and that alone goes beyond the free tier I/O request limit. This is how easy you can get charged using AWS.
Are you sure about that?
Because, I installed Centos 2-3 times and Windows server 2-3 times in the same month. Other than than the Windows was idleing. If that takes me beyond the free tier, then that is a bit rubbish!
What you've used is right there in black and white. You're just not comprehending it.
So..you reinstalled two different operating systems for a total of 4-6 times, and then let Windows idle and you're mad that they charged you a dollar?
1)How am I supposed to know that that will generate >2 million I/O requests!? We are not all web heads and would you have known that installing O/S 4-6 times would lead to >2million I/O requests? ! I've fired off an email to them so will see what they say. I'll copy and paste here.
2)I am not mad, like I said it's only $1.30 to be precise.
Anyone have a tutorial to use their HD to make backups?
I wrote to AWS about the usage. I asked about the I/O, but they did not explain how I generated such a high I/O. They have decided to refund the full amount though.
I don't understand why they have to explain. It's easy to check (AWS shows I/O stats almost in real time) which operations are most I/O intensive.
can u show me where? i couldn't find it.
For example, at the moment my stats are:
It's the principle that matters, they advertize as free tier, however take credit card info in order to bill. Why they just don't shut down the instance if it passes the free tier limit? The free tier is enough as a marketing method, they should not be ripping people off.
What about if somebody got DoSed on the Amazon cloud? They could bill a fortune out of the end user.