How the AWS ALB cost is calculated?

Question

I have an application load balancer (ALB) for a busy website in Bahrain, daily visits over 200K, yet the monthly cost of the ALB is less than $1. The instance has 1 web site with over 600K article.

Also, I have a small ec2 for 3 websites with ALB, and the monthly cost is $10. The maximum daily visits for all websites are 10.

So, how the bigger site ALB cost less?!

Middle East (Bahrain)

• Elastic Load Balancing - Application $0.85

• USD0.0 per Hrs for LoadBalancerUsage:LoadBalancing:Application usage in Middle East (Bahrain) 696.000 Hrs $0.00

• USD0.0 per LCU-Hrs for LCUUsage:LoadBalancing:Application usage in Middle East (Bahrain) 15.000 LCU-Hrs $0.00

• USD0.0088 per LCU-Hrs for LCUUsage:LoadBalancing:Application in Middle East (Bahrain) 96.111 LCU-Hrs $0.85

US East (N. Virginia)

• Elastic Load Balancing - Application $9.55

• $0.008 per used Application load balancer capacity unit-hour (or partial hour) 1.515 LCU-Hrs $0.01

• $0.0225 per Application LoadBalancer-hour (or partial hour) 424.000 Hrs $9.54

Thanks.

Answer 1

It appears that your Bahrain usage is taking advantage of the AWS Free Tier.

For Elastic Load Balancing, it lists the benefits as:

• 750 Hours per month shared between Classic and Application load balancers
• Automatic distribution of incoming application traffic across multiple Amazon EC2 instances.
• 750 Hours per month shared between Classic and Application load balancers
• 15 GB of data processing for Classic load balancers
• 15 LCUs for Application load balancers

You can see 15.000 mentioned in your bill, which is the 15 LCUs that are provided free for the month. It also looks like you got a lot of hours (696+) for free.

Please note that this discount is only provided for the first 12 months of the AWS Account. After that, the free portion will not be available for Load Balancing.