Per-Second Billing for EC2 Instances

Per-Second Billing for EC2 Instances

No longer do you have to pay the full hour for EC2 instances that are terminated within the hour. Effective October 2nd, usage of Linux instances that are launched in AWS On-Demand, Reserved, and Spot form will be billed in one-second increments. This means that all of your EC2 instances will be charged at a much higher resolution, making your workloads even more cost-effective.

Spot Instances and Per-Second Billing

When you terminate a spot instance before the hour mark, you will now only be partially charged for that hour. This lets you save even more on any instances (spot, on-demand, or reserved) you terminate without worrying about terminating them on the 59th second to fully maximize their usage.

And at Spotinst, we’re thrilled to pass these savings onto you. So we are excited to announce today that Spotinst Elastigroup for EC2 and EMR is fully supporting AWS’s new billing mechanism at launch! We have aligned our metrics to reflect the precise per-second costs of your instances and project them back onto your Spotinst dashboard. This provides all the necessary information you need to manage your spot cluster and monitor its cost.

Under hours, you will now sometimes see a decimal point, representing the per-second usage of your instances (In decimal hours):

This accuracy is propagated across all our systems and will be visible in our monthly billing reports. We are constantly listening to you, our customers – continuously testing, enhancing, and personalizing your customer experience, as customer obsession is the foundation of our company.

How the new pricing works

• Old billing mechanism: AWS would charge one hour for any usage that was under 60 minutes. So if your instance was running for 11 minutes or 59 minutes, you’d be charged for a full hour.

• New billing mechanism: AWS charges you only for the seconds you use. Now if your instance is running for 11 minutes, you’ll only be charged for the time it was up.

TLDR: How does this affect my Spotinst account?

In short, it just makes Spotinst even more cost-effective. You will now be charged for running spot instances on a per-second basis as opposed to paying for a full hour of usage when running a spot instance for less than an hour.