"free tier" instances ... exceeded 85% of 1 GB bandwidth in 4 days ... How can I see bandwidth usage?

Question

I'm experimenting with Amazon AWS free tier.

Only been four days, and I just got an email: "I've exceeded 85% of my 1Gig bandwidth"

How can I tell what used this bandwidth?

What I've done ... I created and terminated some t2.micro linux instances. Installed nginx and tomcat on them with "apt-get". Downloaded a 16MB zip file using "wget" a few times. I also created some VM images from the instances.

Does all of that count towards bandwidth?

Is there a way in the console to see current bandwidth usage and what's eating it up?

Chantress

Answer 1

Every month, the first 1GB of "Data Transfer OUT From Amazon EC2 To Internet" is free. This is actually for all accounts, not just in the AWS Free Tier.

This counts all traffic that goes out of the AWS Cloud to the Internet. For example, anyone accessing your website from the Internet and downloading web pages, images, etc would count towards that 1GB.

It does not include traffic going into the cloud. So, downloading those software packages from the Internet to the EC2 instance would not count towards that 1GB (except for the little bit of traffic that requests the download and confirms each packet as it is received).

If you exceed the free 1GB, traffic is charged at 9c/GB.

The Free Tier services table is listed in your billing console, showing how much of each limit has been consumed. However, it does not provide a breakdown of "what's eating it up". See: Tracking your AWS Free Tier usage - AWS Billing and Cost Management

Dovelike

Thanks, that helps a lot. 1GB sounds like a big amount to burn through in 5 days of just me playing with a text-based web app, is it? Is there a way to see what the bandwidth was, from where it came, and when it was transferred? – Chantress

No, that breakdown is not available. If your website is publicly available, it might have been caused by search bots scraping your content. You could turn on logging in your web server to determine whether this is happening. But, keep in mind the cost of your time, which is probably worth more than 9c. – Dovelike

When I upload files from my laptop to EC2 machine using winscp, will it count towards 1 GB cap? – Lehmbruck

@shyamyadav The charges are for "Data Transfer OUT From Amazon EC2 To Internet". Therefore, it is not applied to transfers IN from the Internet to AWS. – Dovelike