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Comment by cconstantine | Hacker News Reader

This is something that's always confused me with Amazon's EC2 pricing. If I were to run an instance for my personal use it would, for the post part, have to be up 24/7 but it would be idle for the vast majority of that time. Would I be charged for 24*31 hours?

If so, those 25 free machine hours are fairly worthless.

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Yes, for EC2 you are charged the amount of time that you use, your machine uses the RAM and still uses the CPU (it's not completely idle).

But SimpleDB's machine hours is the actual time of your queries.

Yes, I think you would be charged for those hours.

If you need a server up 24/7 then EC2 is not the right provider for you; you should be looking at a more conventional hosting companies (Linode and Slicehost have already been mentioned here). EC2 is for people who expect they will need an extra server (or two, or ten) up for one (or two, or ten) hours out of every week, and for the rest of the week they don't care if that server is effectively turned off.

This is what I was afraid of. I'm playing around with a couple toy webapps at appengine because it's free, and I'd like to do the same with ec2.

I really don't want to accidentally leave it 'on' and get a bill so I''ll continue avoiding it.

EC2 isn't free but it's pretty cheap, it starts from 0.10$/h. If you follow the tutorials on EC2 you'll see that it's pretty well explained how you see your running instances and how to stop them. There is also elasticfox, a Firefox plugin to manage your instances (and other complex commercial management tools)

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