That's pretty interesting. I've been frustrated in the past by both AWS and GoGrid (and I'm sure every other cloud provider) that keep incurring VPS instance costs even when the instance is shut off. I understand that even if I'm not using the VPS the resources need to be kept in reserve (in theory), but the solution of destroying and reprovisioning instances sucks pretty bad, way to time consuming if you are dealing with only a handful and operationalizing it is not not worth it.
I'd love to move to a provider that let me provision an extra instance or two for either failover or testing/staging but not be charged for it if I wasn't running traffic to it.
EDIT: I stand corrected, I might have been thinking of Rackspace's cloud (can't remember what it's called now) instead of AWS. But I know for a fact I am right on GoGrid (and pretty sure Azure) because I have a long email chain arguing about charges for provisioned instances in off states.
Unless AWS has changed something since I last used it (which admittedly has been at least a year), they don't charge when an instance is off except for storage.
That's also not exactly true. If you purchase a reserved instance, you pay the up front price, and then the reduced hourly price for whenever the instance is running.
To anyone reading this later... I am wrong here. Heavy Utilization reservations are charged whether or not you have instances running. Medium and Light are only charged when running.
I'd love to move to a provider that let me provision an extra instance or two for either failover or testing/staging but not be charged for it if I wasn't running traffic to it.
EDIT: I stand corrected, I might have been thinking of Rackspace's cloud (can't remember what it's called now) instead of AWS. But I know for a fact I am right on GoGrid (and pretty sure Azure) because I have a long email chain arguing about charges for provisioned instances in off states.