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Concerns about my Light Sail's 3 free months plan
Hello everyone. We are new in AWS and have started the 3 months free trial of Light Sail. It's been around 2 weeks and looking at the Billing section I see that it's going to charge us for around 90 USD. And I could't find any information on my account regarding the free trial so that I'm actually expecting to be charged at the end of July... Additional information:
- I have no credits on the Credits Section, it says $0
- I know they are different things but we are still below the limit of the Free Tier
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Hi,
To add another possibility to iBehr's suggestion, please confirm that the plan type you have chosen is one of those that are eligible for free trial namely the first three sizes of the Lightsail instance plan sizes.
It appears you may be using a much larger Lightsail instance plan type that is not included in the free trial. For example 2 weeks of the 32 GB RAM Memory plan will cost about $164/2 = about 80 USD which looks very close to your charges.
Thanks
iBehr/AWS-SUM, thank you for your quick response!
I'm sending you two more prints that have more detail of the services we are using:
Again, I'm new and I still can't understand why it appears we will be charged when the console says we have 0 services above the usage limits and also we haven't reached the 750 hs (we are currently at 320 hs)
PS.: the chosen service is Windows plans with IPv4 address for free for 90 days
Thank you in advance!
answered 2 years ago
You can see the Free Tier offers here.
Specifically the Lightsail option is as defined below -- 750 hours of usage per month of the following plans.
Free Tier
FREE TRIAL
Amazon Lightsail
750 Hours
per month, for 90 days
Virtual Private Servers made easy! Everything you need to jumpstart your project on AWS with compute, storage, and networking.
For a limited time, new Lightsail customers get up to 90 days free
Try the $5/mo, $7/mo, or $12/mo Linux/Unix plans with IPv4 address for free for 90 days
Try the $9.50/mo, $14/mo, or $22/mo Windows plans with IPv4 address for free for 90 days
Try the $3.50/mo, $5/mo, or $10/mo Linux/Unix plans with IPv6 address only for free for 90 days
Try the $8/mo, $12/mo, or $20/mo Windows plans with IPv6 address only, for free for 90 days
Try the $10/mo Micro container service with one node, for free for 90 days
Try the $15/mo managed database plan for free for 90 days
So, if you launch more than 1 instance you will go through the 750 hours faster and have to pay for usage beyond the 750 hours/month.
Additionally, the screenshot you provided is not showing detail. I would dig into the bill a bit deeper to verify what services are being billed to make up the $90+. Further down the page you should see a tab with Charges by Service to see the detail.
Hope this helps!
I have 22$ Windows VM with both IPv4 and IPv6 address enabled I am really new to AWS and didn't knew I should only use IPV4 in free trial
IPv4 + IPv6 networking is enabled in my windows VM
I can see a button to turn off IPV6
should I turn it off immediately to avoid being charged during my 90 days free trial?
I fear I might be charged for just keeping that on
The
plans with IPv4 addressmentioned above include the dual-stack i.e. IPv4+IPv6 plans. That means your $22 Windows VM with both IPv4 and IPv6 address enabled is eligible for free trial. You do not need to turn OFF IPv6 to avoid charges. So as long as your usage is up to 750 hours in the month, and you are within the free trial 90 days since first-usage and don't have any DataTransfer overages, you should not see any charges for that VM.
Thankyou very much Sir
It says Hyper- cannot be installed The processor does not have required virtualization capabilities.
CAN I make my Lightsail VM support virtualization?
I saw 1.5TB bandwidth , this means I can upload+download a total of 1.5TB , right? Or is downloading to VM free of cost?
answered 2 years ago
The DataTransfer allowance includes both data transfer IN and data transfer OUT: so for your instance it will be total upload+download of 1.5TB is included in the plan cost. You can see more detailed information here - https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lightsail/latest/userguide/amazon-lightsail-frequently-asked-questions-faq-billing-and-account-management.html#how-does-my-data-transfer-allowance-work-for-instances
The Lightsail instance itself is a virtual machine. But it wont support nested virtualization. For that you will need to use the bare metal instance types available in Amazon EC2. Some information on that is available here https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/02/introducing-five-new-amazon-ec2-bare-metal-instances/ and here https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/running-hyper-v-on-amazon-ec2-bare-metal-instances/
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As @AWS-SUM calls out above and confirmed in your screenshot, you are using at 32GB instance size that is not part of the free tier offering. You will need to switch to one of the specifically named instance sizes to get the free trial.
Understood. So these are the ones covered by the free trial:
$9.50 USD/mo 0.5GB Memory 2 vCPUs*** 30 GB SSD Disk 1 TB Transfer*
$14 USD/mo 1 GB Memory 2 vCPUs*** 40 GB SSD Disk 2 TB Transfer*
$22 USD/mo 2 GB Memory 2 vCPUs*** 60 GB SSD Disk 3 TB Transfer*
How do we proceed with the downgrade?
Thank you!
Unfortunately, you can't directly downgrade a plan size. What you could do instead, is launch a new instance of the $22 plan, and then copy the data over from your current non-free instance over to this new instance. If there is no data to recover, you can just start fresh with a new instance and delete old. . If there is data to recover, there are a few options e.g. copy data manually from old to new using SFTP as mentioned in https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lightsail/latest/userguide/amazon-lightsail-connecting-to-linux-unix-instance-using-sftp.html or create a snapshot of the root disk of the old instance, create a new disk from it and then attach this disk to a new instance to recover data. Once done, you can detach, and delete the attached disk. This doc has detailed steps - https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lightsail/latest/userguide/amazon-lightsail-create-an-instance-root-volume-snapshot.html (for steps 1 and 2 in that guide related to AWS CLI, you could instead use AWS CloudShell as mentioned in https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lightsail/latest/userguide/amazon-lightsail-cloudshell.html#lightsail-cloudshell-launch-and-use) . Please be sure to delete your old instance (not
stop) once your are done with setup of new and are satisfied. Please do create an instance-snapshot of the old instance before deletion, as a backup, in case you need to recover something that was missed.