I have Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volumes associated with my account. How are they charged on my bill?
Amazon EBS volumes are billed by the gigabyte-month (GB/m), which is a measure of how many gigabytes of EBS storage are provisioned to your account and how long the EBS storage is provisioned to your account.
For the following examples, assume a 31-day month. You are billed for one gigabyte-month in any of the following scenarios:
- If you had a 31 GB volume that was only active for 24 hours.
- If you had a 31 GB volume active for one hour a day, each day of the month.
- If you had a 1 GB volume active for 744 hours (the number of hours in 31 days).
You are billed for the total amount of storage provisioned to your account, regardless of whether the storage is used or not. For example, if you provisioned a 100 GB EBS volume for a month, but only stored 1 GB of data on that volume, you are still billed for 100 GB/m of EBS storage.
To minimize the amount you're billed for Amazon EBS storage, consider the following strategies:
- Delete or create snapshots of any volumes you're not actively using, reducing your overall storage.
- Audit your EBS volumes to see if you're using most of the storage in the volume. If not, consider provisioning smaller EBS volumes.
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Published: 2017-07-03
