From Rick...

Downgrading from Bronze to PPY

Sorry if this was covered somewhere. Honestly, I did spend about 5 minutes looking for it. :o)

I have been paying for the BRONZE plan every since there was a hobby plan, but I think I could save a little by reverting back to the Pay-per-use plan. My Monthly AWS charges are currently only about $30, so that would cost me $13 for TKL pay-per-use, right? ($10 + 10% of $30)

The thing is, I don't know enough about how the heck TKL interacts with Amazon to be able to know exactly how to do this. Here are my concerns:

1) Currently, BRONZE says ACTIVATED in the green button under TKL plans, and all of the higher plans (silver, gold, planinum) have the 'switch' option in their green button. But the pay-per-use plan says "Enable". This confuses me and makes me scared to press "Enable", because I don't want to end up with two plans. (happened before!)

2) When I attempted to cancel my current bronze plan, it sternly warned me that doing so would possibly kill all of my servers on AWS. Y I K E S. That scares me to death. Not gonna do that!

So, what am I supposed to do? Can someone help me in a way that my servers don't die on me and I end up paying the pay per use fees instead of the bronze fees?

Thanks so much!

Rick

Nor do I know the answers to his questions, just psoting so others can chime in

Sorry about the spam filter being over-zealous @rick, we'll look into that. Thanks to @eric for posting for posting the comment.

There is technical distinction between Pay-per-use and all the other plans (not just pricing), which is why both types can be enabled at the same time. Pay-per-use uses S3-backed instances, where as all the other plans use EBS-backed instances.

S3 backed instances use ephemural storage for the root filesystem, which means you cannot "stop" an instance. Nor can you use the snapshots feature, or reserved instances to reduce costs. These are technical limitations.

On the flip side, EBS backed instances can be stopped and started at will. They can be snapshotted and cloned. They also support reserved instances to reduce costs.

So why would someone want both plans? For example:

• Historical reasons - they already have S3-backed servers and want to migrate to EBS-backed as time progresses.
• Pay-per-use supports all instance types, where as the EBS-based plans add larger instance support as you climb up the plan scale.

Given the above, you cannot "migrate" between the EBS based plans and the S3 based plan if you already have running servers. You could enable the S3 plan, migrate your servers using TKLBAM from EBS to S3, then cancel the EBS based plan...

I hope the above makes sence, and I managed to answer your questions. If something isn't clear, let me know.