Why am I charged for Amazon EBS storage when all my Amazon EC2 instances are stopped?

Short description

Amazon EBS charges you for storage that's provisioned to your account, calculated in gigabyte-months.

You incur charges only for EC2 instances that are running.

However, EBS volumes that you attach to instances keep information and increase charges, even after you stop the instance. For more information, see Amazon EBS pricing.

Note: Amazon EBS doesn't charge you when you detach a volume from an instance. However, you still incur charges for volume storage until you delete the volume.

Resolution

Reduce EBS volume costs

AWS bills Amazon EBS snapshots at a lower rate than active EBS volumes.

To reduce EBS volume costs, create a snapshot of the volume as a backup, and then delete the active volume. To retrieve the information from the snapshot, replace the EBS volume with the snapshot.

Stop EBS volume costs

To stop Amazon EBS related charges, delete the EBS volumes and snapshots that you don't need.

Related information

Why didn't my storage costs reduce after I deleted a snapshot of my EBS volume and then the volume itself?

Attach an Amazon EBS volume to an Amazon EC2 instance