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I have taken a AWS Lightsail Unix Instance for one of my pilot project, I wanted to explore AWS ecosystem and thought this would be a easy playground to start with. The plan I opted was a USD 5 per month, which gives 1 GB Memory, 1 Core Processor, 40 GB SSD Disk and 2 TB Transfer.
After subscribing I created a LAMP instance and a Plesk Instance, assigned static IPs to both instances and setup connections from my PC to transfer files using PuTTY; also setup access to Plesk and phpMyAdmin to start work.
In the first month itself, I am seeing a huge bill of USD 985 for using AWS RDS, details in bill are as below:
Amazon Relational Database Service for MySQL Community Edition
$1.080 per RDS db.r4.xlarge Multi-AZ instance hour (or partial hour) running MySQL
My question is – When I created LAMP, does it create a AWS RDB service automatically, I have hardly used MySql for anything. It seems AWS Lightsail is throwing hidden charges without notifying customers about actuals.
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Answers
Thank you folks! I tried to go through several docs AWS provides on pricing. There is no indication that AWS RDB services automatically starts on LAMP installation. I wanted to take second opinion before raising a complaint with them. I have opened a case, and they have confirmed to revert the charges, however there is no clarity how AWS RDS service has started. At present I have removed all DB snapshots and backups.
No, creating a LAMP stack on Lightsail does not create an RDS instance on your behalf. With the LAMP stack on Lightsail, the MySQL database is installed on that instance alongside PHP and Apache – there is no charge beyond the $5.00 / month (in your case) as long as you don’t go over the data transfer limit.
I can’t say why you’re getting charged for RDS, but it’s not because you fired up Lightsail instances.