Service guide
How to reduce AWS EBS costs
EBS waste is the most mechanical on AWS: the fixes are one-liners, the savings are exact percentages, and nothing requires downtime. It persists anyway, because block storage is invisible until someone lists it.
The free scan lists every volume by type, attachment state and utilisation, plus every snapshot with a dead parent — priced individually.
Run the free scanThe EBS checklist
- →gp2 → gp3: flat 20%. $0.10 vs $0.08 per GB-month for identical storage — and gp3’s 3,000-IOPS baseline beats gp2 for every volume under 1 TB. Migration is live via Elastic Volumes: one API call, no detach, no restart. There is no reason to run gp2 in 2026.
- →Unattached volumes. Volumes survive their instances (DeleteOnTermination defaults off for non-root volumes). Anything in "available" state is billing at full rate and serving nothing — snapshot it if nervous, then delete.
- →Orphaned snapshots. Snapshots of deleted volumes and deregistered AMIs at $0.05/GB-month, accumulating since whenever backups were set up. Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager (free) automates create-and-expire so it never rebuilds.
- →Oversized volumes. A 500 GB volume that is 12% full bills for 500 GB. Volumes cannot shrink in place — but a snapshot-restore to a right-sized volume during a maintenance window halves the line item for chronically overprovisioned disks.
- →io1/io2 without the IOPS need. Provisioned-IOPS volumes at $0.125/GB plus $0.065 per IOPS-month, serving workloads gp3 would handle. Check actual IOPS consumption in CloudWatch — the answer is usually a fraction of what is provisioned.
Put numbers on it
Frequently asked questions
Is the gp2 to gp3 migration really zero-downtime?
Yes — EBS Elastic Volumes modifies the type while the volume stays attached and in use. The volume enters an "optimizing" state for minutes to hours depending on size, remaining fully usable throughout. The only caution: volumes over 1 TB using more than 3,000 IOPS need those IOPS provisioned explicitly on gp3, which trims the saving.
How much do unattached volumes typically add up to?
In accounts more than two years old, commonly 5–15% of the total EBS bill — terminated instances leave their data volumes behind by default, and nobody lists volumes by attachment state. It is the purest waste on AWS: full price, zero function.
£499 fixed. Free scan first. 20%+ found or it’s free.
The scan is read-only — a role you create and delete, no keys shared — and shows your estimated monthly saving before anyone talks about money.