What in god’s name is going on with EC2 Micro instance spot pricing?
I have recently had my instance shut down because the spot price for micro instances in US East zone went up to some ridiculous price like $5/hour! Crazy price, but it only sits there for an little while and then drops back down.
In any event, I have come of spot prices for the time being and have gone to normal pricing which means it costs a bit more but at least I have control of how much I will be paying and not have instances dropping off. An added drama with micro instances is there is no included persistent storage, so when the thing gets shut down all changes made to that image since that last save have been lost (except for the data that I have saved in a persistent storage device I have paid Amazon protection money for and that I mount on the instance).
In any event, may consider moving my instance to Amazons Singapore data center once I figure out how to do that and perhaps go back on spot prices after the move (Singapore seems to be less volatile, presumably given the lesser demand there – just need to worry about supply).
***UPDATE 30 Dec 2011***
Here is a graph showing the wild fluctuations in spot pricing for t1.micro instances. keep in mind the on demand price is currently $0.02/hour. What the!
