Scott Moser and I were wondering if stopping and starting an EBS boot instance on EC2 would begin a new hour’s worth of charges or if AWS would not increase your costs if the stop/start were done a few minutes apart in the same hour.
For some reason, I had assumed that it would start a new hour of fees, possibly because of my experience with the somewhat unrelated terminating old instances and starting new instances. However, we decided it would be easy to test, so here are the results.
I tested with an Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick 32-bit server EBS boot AMI on the m1.small instance type in the ap-southeast-1 (Singapore) region. The AMI should have no effect on charges, so these results should apply to any OS you run on EC2.
I used an AWS account that did not have any EC2 instance fees in the Singapore region that month (Scott’s idea) so that this activity would be easy to see as the only charges on that account.