How to avoid charges for Simple Storage Service in S3

Sorry to hear you're seeing these charges.

You can follow the steps in this article to track down the resources at fault: http://go.aws/resources-unexpected-charges

You can also each out to our Accounts and Billing experts via your Support Center: http://go.aws/tech-support.

Regards,

- Randi S.

Hello,

Sorry to hear you're seeing charges you were not expecting.

First, to help you find where these charges are coming from, you can use AWS Cost Explorer.

For your scenario, you can filter to services "S3 (Simple Storage Service)" and "Glacier"; also set your Group by Dimension to "Usage type". This will show all Glacier and S3 costs and group them by type of charge (for example, storage volume per class, API requests, etc).

Second, to clarify S3 and Glacier charges, it's important to understand that there is a difference between Amazon S3 Glacier (formerly known as Amazon Glacier) and the Glacier storage classes in Amazon S3.

Although the names are similar, Amazon S3 Glacier is a separate service from Amazon S3, with distinct APIs and individual billing. When you use Glacier storage classes in an S3 bucket, you will be billed through S3 - not through Glacier.

As a result, when you use the Cost Explorer as directed above (filter to S3 & Glacier, group by Usage type), you will see line items for "TimedStorage-ByteHours", where '' reflects the S3 storage class. For example:

• GDA = Glacier Deep Archive
• GIR = Glacier Instant Retrieval
• GLACIER = Glacier Flexible Retrieval (fka. Glacier) etc.

If you have your objects in S3 Glacier storage classes, you'll see that they are being billed under Amazon S3 at the appropriate Glacier storage class pricing rate.

One additional caveat is that Amazon S3 Glacier storage classes have a minimum object size of 128 KB. Objects smaller than 128 KB will be charged for a minimum of 128 KB; there is also a small additional overhead for index and metadata. See the annotations on the S3 Storage pricing table.