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How/when does Amazon calculate how much I will have to pay for EBS?

I accidentally created a 100 GiB EBS volume and deleted it after 20 mins when I realized what I had done, does it mean I will be charged $10 at the end of the month?

It's been a couple of hours and it doesn't look like I've been charged with anything.

mak
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3 Answers3

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EBS is charged per-second (as of Sept 2017, before that it was per-hour) and it's against what you allocate. The minimum is 60 seconds.

The snapshots size is supposed to only be non-empty blocks since the allocation, and each subsequent snapshot is of the blocks that have changed since the last snapshot. EBS snapshots are still charged per-hour.

For 100GB gp2 it'll be charged about 20 minutes of usage (and some number of seconds) and assuming $0.10/GB/Month you should warn your bank about the incoming charge of about $0.0046.

Per-second announcement: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-per-second-billing-for-ec2-instances-and-ebs-volumes/

Cost calculation example: https://aws.amazon.com/ebs/pricing/

Thanks to @Vorsprung for the hint.

Rob Olmos
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EBS charges for space that you've allocated; so if you use 1GB on a 100GB volume, you'll be charged for 100GB. The clencher here is that you get charged on an hourly basis. I.e., 100GB would be $10 monthly, meaning if you kept the 100GB instance up for an hour, you'd be charged $0.0000039 for use.

If you store a SNAPSHOT, you'll be charged for the data that you actually use--because the snapshot process ignores empty pages. Take a look at the last section on the EBS page for details.

Andrew M.
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  • I found this on their forum: [Pricing for Amazon EBS is based on the amount of storage provisioned. Once you create an EBS volume, we reserve this entire chunk of storage for you and consider it used by you.](http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/message.jspa?messageID=102378) But it was posted 2 years ago. – mak Nov 03 '10 at 06:57
  • You're absolutely right; however, I found out why I wasn't charged anything either (or at least, nothing more than a penny). I have reverted my answer. – Andrew M. Nov 03 '10 at 12:18
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EBS storage is not an hourly charge but a monthly. Even if you have all of your instances powered off you are still charged for your EBS usage.

Rodney Beede
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    The true part of this answer "Even if you have all of your instances powered off you are still charged for your EBS usage." https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/knowledge-center/ebs-charge-stopped-instance/ – Mazen Elkashef Jan 16 '17 at 18:44