What Constitutes a Compute Hour or Cost Hour

Question

Preface

I've been shopping around for cloud based hosting solutions, particularly MS Azure & Amazon's EC2. They, Microsoft and Amazon, have pricing tables which describe a "cost/hour"/"compute hour."

Question

When they say "cost/hour" or "compute hour," what's in an hour? Is it the amount of time an application pool, in the case of an ASP.NET app, is active? Or, the amount of time that your application is active? Or, is it related in some manner to the incoming requests per hour/minute?

Is there a possibility that if the app is not active (serving requests) it's not factored into the overall cost calculation, thus reducing the overall "compute time"?

Answer 1

An hour counts as the time your app is deployed (running or not, being accessed or not). An hour is a 'wall clock' hour - meaning if you deploy at 10:45am and deleted at 11:05am, you are charged two hours (the 10 o'clock hour and the 11 o'clock hour).

Simple as that :-)