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 will be counted as the time when your application is deployed. If it runs or not, accessed or not it is still the same. An hour is a “wall clock”. This means if you deploy your application at 5:50 am and stop it at 6:30 am, it will be charged with a two-hour cost. (i.e. 5 o’clock hour and the 6 o’clock hour).