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Comment by willcipriano | Hacker News Reader

Apparently I owe AWS 1 cent for DNS. The problem is I can't login to pay it, so every month I get a email that says "your aws account is going to be suspended" and 30 days later I'm disappointed that they didn't follow through with the threat.

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AWS charges me $1 or $2 every month, and I log into my account and click through every page and can't find a single active service or any clue on what it's for. It's marked "EC2 - Other", whatever the f that means

Possibly a disassociated elastic IP address?

Yeah, that's an elastic IP, check under EC2.

People forget to clean them up after shutting down the instance (probably kept in case you want to keep your IP)

It's crazy that it's so common, but that they wouldn't make that obvious.

Considering the whole IPv4 extinction that's coming down and all.

So an elastic IP is just an AWS provided IP that they hand over to you... it's free while your instance is running but if you stop your instance, you get a small bill (it's like $0.84 a month)

I will gladly welcome the eventual IPv4 extinction, but unfortunately I'm pretty confident it won't happen for another 30 years.

I don't have any elastic IPs. The only thing under EC2 is a security group that it won't let me delete, but seems like no resources. My bill this month is $2.88 /shrug

Check volumes, non-root volumes are kept on deletion but should be EBS charged instead.

What does the bill details screen show? I manage an AWS bill and I find it overly detailed. Others mentioned leftover EIPs, but the bill shows these as their own line item.

Not saying it can't happen, but I've never seen an 'Other' listed on the bill details screen. As I said above, it's detailed to a fault.

Actually it looks like this is for an EBS snapshot. Now it seems like EBS is a Lightsail feature, and the Lightsail console says that I don't have any storage or snapshots? Hm

EBS is also the general external storage attached to an instance. Go the ec2 console and look at snapshots and you should see it there. They are region specific, so make sure to select the region referred to on the bill.

I haven't used Lightsail, so I'm not sure if those snapshots end up in the general ec2 console. But, if you already checked the LS console and didn't see anything, then they must be in the ec2 console.

I wonder if there is a human whose job is to final review suspensions and they just keep shaking their head at the measly pending $0.01 charge.

I keep a penny on my desk at work. Every time a coworker comes across somebody's account that is off by a penny, I offer it. They think I'm being funny, but the point I'm trying to make is that it wastes more than pennies worth of our time to spend it worrying about a few cents.

I've seen people mail in checks worth less than the stamp it took to send them. It's a wild world out there.

The interesting thing is, accounts being off by a penny or two (excluding actions such as customers doing a mis-type in the bank transfer) can actually point to deeper issues such as improper rounding somewhere in the path.

Usually they wrote us a check for the wrong amount at some point and end up with a small balance remaining in their account. We don't want to just forgive and forget every time somebody owes us $0.16, but if it's been there months and it's going to take extra effort to get it from them, it's probably not worth it.

We do try to determine where the discrepancy started and watch for indicators of a bigger issue.

Or a compromised system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cuckoo%27s_Egg_(book)

Hahah yeah I say the same thing every month "yeah okay go ahead and do it then"

I have to imagine that these things are manual and a human has to do it, so they'll sort it by the size of the account and do what matters

They do this to me too every month, as the card on my AWS has expired, and they complain and complain and complain before finally charging the card on my Audible account. Definitely need to get around to separating those.

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