Strange behaviour of CPU balance in t2.2xlarge AWS EC2 instance
stackoverflow.com
stackoverflow.com
But seriously, this shouldn't be a Stackoverflow post, go ask Amazon, they are the service provider, they created this opaque algorithm that only they use for CPU credits, thus they are the gate keeper. Perhaps at quiet times (when your neighbors have low CPU) your baseline usage is a higher portion of the overall CPU use on that server.
Regardless, get off AWS, a dedi with better specs is under $50 and you'll not have to worry about CPU credits or noisy neighbors.
https://www.lowendtalk.com/discussion/105114/dedicated-serve...
Admittedly we also find it expensive, but we try to balance off by making use of their infrastructure. Altogether we pay about half of what we used to pay when we had our servers collocated and we had a need for overprovising, so we still have a sense of saving money, at least for now (we migrated from collocated servers to AWS 6 months ago).
You could throw KVM or Xen on it and run Windows atop it pretty easily, plus depending on where you colo you could likely get some DDOS protection thrown in.
Alternatively, Subnet Labs, Vultr or any of the dozens of other providers that specialize in dedicated core VPSes could likely come in at somewhere around a quarter of what your currently paying, which would take you out of the loop for managing hardware entirely.
Have you asked Amazon whats going on yet by the way?