Explanation: Previously, if you launched an instance for 5 minutes, you would pay for 1 hour. If you launched an instance for 45 minutes, you would also pay for 1 hour. This means that partial hours cost as much as one full hour. Pricing is per instance-hour consumed for each instance, from the time an instance is launched until it is terminated or stopped. Each partial instance-hour consumed will be billed as a full hour. With EC2 services now billed per-second in some cases, as well as per-hour in others as of October 2, 2017, there is more to consider. Amazon AWS is still based on the concept of pay-as-you-go. You pay Amazon EC2 instances by the second for all instance types except Dedicated Host, which is still billed per instance-hour. You are billed per second when using Linux operating systems with no separate hourly charge, and billed per hour when using Windows operating systems. Reference: http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/