I Left My AWS EC2 Running for 30 Days — Here's Exactly What It Cost Me

The AWS bill that taught me more than any tutorial ever could. The Mistake Every Beginner Makes It was 2am. I had just finished setting up my first production EC2 instance. Nginx configured. CI/CD pipeline working. Website live on the internet. I was so excited I forgot one small thing. I forgot to stop the instance. For 30 days. When I opened my AWS billing dashboard that month — my heart stopped for a second. I had been running a t2.micro instance 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for an entire month without realizing it. Today I'm sharing exactly what it cost me, what I learned, and how you can avoid the same mistake. 💸 My EC2 Setup — What Was Running Before I share the numbers let me tell you exactly what I had running: Instance type: t2.micro (free tier eligible) Region: ap-south-1 (Mumbai) Operating system: Ubuntu 22.04 LTS What was on it: Nginx web server with a simple static website Storage: 8GB EBS gp2 volume Data transfer: Minimal — just occasional visits to the live site This i