What is cheaper than a reserved instance on AWS? How about not running an instance in the first place?

AWS announced a new reserved instance model, designed to save you up to 63% per instance. Most small and mid-sized companies aren’t going to commit for 3 years, so we are looking at something closer to 40% savings. That’s a good start.

However, chances are you are over provisioning - running more and/or larger EC2 instances than you actually need. Let me illustrate this with a few charts. Suppose the traffic to your site follows the usual wave.