Why Amazon EC2 Dedicated Instances?

Dedicated Instances are Amazon EC2 instances that run in a VPC on hardware that's dedicated to a single customer. Your Dedicated instances are physically isolated at the host hardware level from instances that belong to other AWS accounts. Dedicated instances may share hardware with other instances from the same AWS account that are not Dedicated instances. Pay for Dedicated Instances On-Demand, save up to 70% by purchasing Reserved Instances, or save up to 90% by purchasing Spot Instances.

You can also use Dedicated Hosts to launch Amazon EC2 instances on physical servers that are dedicated for your use. Dedicated Hosts give you additional visibility and control over how instances are placed on a physical server, and you can reliably use the same physical server over time. As a result, Dedicated Hosts enable you to use your existing server-bound software licenses like Windows Server and address corporate compliance and regulatory requirements. Visit this page to compare Dedicated Instances and Dedicated Hosts.

Pricing

Dedicated On-Demand instances | Dedicated Spot instances | Dedicated Reserved instances

Pay only for what you use with no long-term commitments. Dedicated Instance pricing has two components: (1) an hourly per instance usage fee and (2) a dedicated per region fee (note that you pay this once per hour regardless of how many Dedicated Instances you're running).

Dedicated per region fee

$2 per hour - An additional fee is charged once per hour in which at least one Dedicated Instance of any type is running in a region.

Notice: Red Hat has made an update to their cloud pricing model for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). On July 1, 2024 pricing for EC2 RHEL changed to a per-vCPU-hour based pricing model. Learn about the new prices in the RHEL on AWS Pricing page.

Dedicated On-Demand instances

On-Demand instances let you pay for compute capacity by the hour with no long-term commitments.

Pricing is per instance-hour consumed for each instance type. Partial instance-hours consumed are billed as full hours.

Dedicated Spot instances

Spot instances allow you to bid on unused Amazon EC2 capacity and pay by the hour. Dedicated Spot instances have the same price as standard Spot instances. Click here to learn more about Spot Instances.

Dedicated Reserved instances

Dedicated Reserved Instances provide a capacity reservation so that you can have confidence in your ability to launch the number of instances you have reserved when you need them. Dedicated Reserved Instances also provide you with a significant discount (up to 75%) compared to On-Demand instance pricing. Click here to learn more about Reserved Instances.

  • Standard
  • Convertible

*This is the average monthly payment over the course of the Reserved Instance term. For each month, the actual monthly payment will equal the actual number of hours in that month multiplied by the hourly usage rate or number of seconds in that month multiplied by the hourly usage rate divided by 3600, depending on the EC2 Dedicated Instance type you run. The hourly usage rate is equivalent to the total average monthly payments over the term of the Reserved Instance divided by the total number of hours (based on a 365 day year) over the term of the Reserved Instance.

**Effective hourly pricing is shown to help you calculate the amount of money that a Reserved Instance will save you over On-Demand pricing. When you purchase a Reserved Instance, you are billed for every hour during the entire Reserved Instance term that you select, regardless of whether the instance is running or not. The effective hourly price shows the amortized hourly cost of the instance (this takes the total cost of the Reserved Instance over the entire term, including any upfront payment, and spreads it out over each hour of the Reserved Instance term).

Note: The Asia Pacific (Osaka-Local) region only offers Reserved Instances and Spot Instances. On-Demand instance prices in the Asia Pacific (Osaka-Local) region are for reference and only apply when Reserved Instances expire and are not renewed.

Reserved instance volume discounts

For Reserved Instance pricing and volume discount information, please visit the Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances page.

T3 Unlimited Mode pricing

For T3 instances in Unlimited mode, CPU Credits are charged at:

  • $0.05 per vCPU-Hour for Linux, RHEL and SLES, and
  • $0.096 per vCPU-Hour for Windows and Windows with SQL Web

The CPU Credit pricing is the same for all instance sizes, for On-Demand and Reserved Instances, and across all regions.

See Unlimited Mode documentation for details on when CPU Credits are charged.

AWS GovCloud Region

AWS GovCloud is an AWS region designed to allow U.S. government agencies and contractors to move more sensitive workloads into the cloud by addressing their specific regulatory and compliance requirements. For pricing and more information on the new AWS GovCloud region, please visit the AWS GovCloud webpage.

Getting started

To get started using Dedicated Instances within an Amazon VPC, perform the following steps:

  1. Open and log into the AWS Management Console.
  2. Create an Amazon VPC if you do not already have one on the Amazon VPC tab.
  3. Choose "Launch Instance".
  4. Select "Launch Instances Into Your Virtual Private Cloud".
  5. In the "Request Instances Wizard", modify the instance tenancy from "Default" to "Dedicated".
  6. Start using your instance with the knowledge it will not share hardware with instances launched by other customers.

The AWS Management Console is an easy tool to start and manage your instances. If you are looking for more details on launching an instance, a quick tutorial on how to use Amazon EC2 with the AWS Management Console can be found here.

Service terms

The complete AWS Service Terms can be found here.