page_title: Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
section_title: Cost
hierarchical_section_title: Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud / Instance types / Cost
caption_attribution_description: English: 31 price reductions in Amazon Web Services since 2006, announced by Werner Vogels.
context_page_description: Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud is a part of Amazon.com's cloud-computing platform, Amazon Web Services, that allows users to rent virtual computers on which to run their own computer applications. EC2 encourages scalable deployment of applications by providing a web service through which a user can boot an Amazon Machine Image to configure a virtual machine, which Amazon calls an "instance", containing any software desired. A user can create, launch, and terminate server-instances as needed, paying by the second for active servers – hence the term "elastic". EC2 provides users with control over the geographical location of instances that allows for latency optimization and high levels of redundancy.
  In November 2010, Amazon switched its own retail website to use EC2 and AWS.
context_section_description: As of April 2018, Amazon charged about $0.0058/hour ($4.176/month) for the smallest "Nano Instance" (t2.nano) virtual machine running Linux or Windows. Storage-optimized instances cost as much as $4.992/hour (i3.16xlarge). "Reserved" instances can go as low as $2.50/month for a three-year prepaid plan. The data transfer charge ranges from free to $0.12 per gigabyte, depending on the direction and monthly volume (inbound data transfer is free on all AWS services).
caption: Amazon CTO Werner Vogels announces price reductions at AWS Summit 2013 NYC
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