Chapter 3 of 6 · 2 min
Why is my S3 bill higher than the storage price?
SHORT ANSWER
Because the $23.55 a terabyte everyone looks up is the rent, and rent is one of six lines on the bill. Downloads alone can be three times the rent.
The lesson 3 film is on chapter 1.
The six lines
- Rent, by the gigabyte and the month.
- Requests, or fetches: $0.005 per 1,000 times a file is read or listed. Small, unless a program lists a bucket every second.
- Retrieval fees on the cheaper shelves: $0.01 to $0.03 for every gigabyte read back.
- Data transfer out, the truck: $0.09 per gigabyte leaving for the internet. Usually the biggest surprise.
- Add-ons you switched on: replication, automatic tiering, inventory reports, each with its own line.
- Lifecycle transitions, or shelf moves: moving a million files to a cheaper shelf is a million billable requests, $10 to $50.
And the bytes you forgot
With version history on, every overwrite keeps the old copy and every delete keeps the file. Cancelled uploads leave pieces behind. None of it appears in the file list; all of it appears as rent.
Open the cost report in your Amazon account, pick S3, group by usage type. The lines name themselves.
The last answer in this lesson walks through that report.
How to reduce your Amazon S3 costs has every rate and the steps.
NEXT · CHAPTER 4 OF 6Does deleting files cut the bill right away?Usually. Two settings turn a delete into a bigger bill.What is my bucket costing me?
See what my buckets cost S3 Savings reads three months of your real S3 bill and shows which of these answers apply to your buckets. Free, read-only, no card.