AWS EC2 Spot Instances
Shares rank 19 of 21 VPS hosts by recommenders
Recommended as cheap spare EC2 capacity, with instances often lasting hours between interruptions.
Recommended as cheap spare EC2 capacity, with instances often lasting hours between interruptions.
8 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 8
- criticize it
- 0
- approval share
- 100%
Recommended in 7 of 13 months
- November 2025: not recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: not recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: not recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: not recommended
- October 2026: not recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 8 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, not met.
- Nobody criticizes itNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 7 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Cheaper than regular EC2 capacity
“It feels like EC2 is the better deal, but maybe more of a pain to deal with their UI.”
Comment from 15 Jan 2026 in “Linux boxes via SSH: suspended when disconected” “EC2 Spot Instances are a great example about how to turn that waste into revenue.”
Comment from 18 Jun 2026 in “How We Run Firecracker VMs Inside EC2 and Start Browsers in <1s” Used as cheap CI runners
“moved to gitea + ec2 spot for actions”
Comment from 17 Aug 2026 in “Ask HN: Alternatives to GitHub” “Queue to aws spot instances”
Comment from 14 Mar 2026 in “Offloading FFmpeg with Cloudflare”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Higher interruption risk on GPUs
“Contention is higher for GPU, but I only saw disruptions maybe once every 2 months for super common instance types.”
Comment from 5 Feb 2026 in “"time to GPT-2", down to 2.91 hours” Console harder to use
“It feels like EC2 is the better deal, but maybe more of a pain to deal with their UI.”
Comment from 15 Jan 2026 in “Linux boxes via SSH: suspended when disconected”
Other VPS hosts people recommend
The four most recommended other VPS hosts, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hetzner | 415 | 212 | 66% | 13 | 5 yrs40 owners | — |
| DigitalOcean | 133 | 117 | 53% | 12 | 10 yrs15 owners | — |
| exe.dev | 115 | 56 | 67% | 11 | — | Approved |
| Hetzner Cloud | 99 | 28 | 78% | 12 | 3 yrs8 owners | Approved |
| AWS EC2 Spot InstancesThis page | 8 | 0 | 100% | 7 | — | — |
What people said
All 8 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“moved to gitea + ec2 spot for actions”
“EC2 Spot Instances are a great example about how to turn that waste into revenue.”
“life couldn't be any simpler”
“Queue to aws spot instances”
“Contention is higher for GPU, but I only saw disruptions maybe once every 2 months for super common instance types.”
“When I once used Spot it wasn't that bad. You're likely to have an instance for 3 hours.”
“It feels like EC2 is the better deal, but maybe more of a pain to deal with their UI.”
“I get the impression that they would vastly prefer cost-conscious users to use spot instances”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.