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Being charged, but have no services running?

0

I'm new to AWS and about a year ago I signed up as I was learning about Node.js and wanted to see if I could set up an AWS instance with this. I procured an EC2 instance and tried to set it up for a couple of hours but couldn't figure out and so switched it off and left it.

Recently, about a year later, I got a small bill for this instance. I can't tell what the charge is for as this instance has not been used for about a year and I have nothing else running.

Could someone help me to figure out what this bill is for and how I can turn everything off so it doesn't happen again?

Many thanks

  • BrianDAnderson_AWS
    6 months ago

    Hello MeltingDog. Sorry to hear about your experience with the unexpected charge. My recommendation would be to go to the Billing and Cost Management console or the Cost and Usage Reports in Cost Explorer to find out what you're being charged for. Here are some additional details:

    To check the resources that are generating charges in your account, do the following:

    Open the AWS Billing and Cost Management console.
In the navigation pane, on the left side of the screen, choose Bills.
The Details section shows all the charges that are being incurred by various AWS services on your account. If you see charges for a service, then that service is generating charges.
If you use the consolidated billing feature in AWS Organizations, then the Bills page lists totals for all accounts on the Consolidated Bill Details tab. Choose the Bill Details by Account tab to see the activity for each account in the organization.
Note: It’s a best practice to check the Details section for the previous month to identify all services that are generating charges.
Under Details, expand each service to identify the Regions where the services have incurred charges.

    Note: The Billing and Cost Management console takes about 24 hours to update usage and charge information for active resources.

    I hope this helps.

    Thank you for your question, Brian Anderson - AWS

Topics
ComputeCloud Financial Management
Tags
Amazon EC2AWS Billing
Language
English
MeltingDog
asked 6 months ago383 views
1 Answer
0

As the account was created just over a year ago, it's likely that your free tier entitlements have just expired, so now you're being charged for resources that were previously in-scope of free tier.

Go to the billing dashboard for your account and pick last month's bill https://us-east-1.console.aws.amazon.com/billing/home?region=us-east-1#/bills

Scroll to the foot to see what you are being charged for - this will break it down per-service and per-region within that. From what you describe it's an EC2 instance that you've been charged for, so drill down into this section to see what this is exactly - if the instance is stopped but not terminated then you could be being charged for the storage volumes associated with it, and/or any snapshots that have been made of it.

Make a note of the region(s) where the charges for EC2 were accrued, then switch to that region in the AWS Console, go to the EC2 section, and properly terminate any instance that are stopped, and/or delete the EBS volume(s) associated with them, and/or delete snapshots, and/or release any elastic IPs (unlikely, but worth checking).

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Steve_M
answered 6 months ago

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