My simple python website hosted on AppEngine got some increase in traffic. It went from total of 447 visitors and 860 views in September (peak 33 visitors on a day) to 1K visitors and 1.5K views in October (peak 61 visitors on a day).

Meanwhile the cost went from $0.00 in September to $10.66 USD in October. The cost breakdown shows that the complete amount is attributed to front end instances, totaling 930.15 hours of usage. That is about 30 hours a day.

Beforehand I have set my max_instances and max_idle_instances to 1. With a single instance running, how is it possible to have 30 hours of usage in a day that lasts 24 hours?

I am using F4 instance class - once a month I parse an excel sheet (that doesn't depend on the number of visits), and more limited instance classes were timing out. As well, my front end is optimized and it fits in less than 30Kb. So with only 1.5K views a month, how can I have that much front end instance hours?

CodePudding user response：

It is possible that you consume more than 24 hours in a day because F4 instances consumes 4 hours in an hour.

See here.

For example, if you use an F4 instance for one hour, you see "Frontend Instance" billing for four instance hours at the F1 rate.

And App Engine bills depending on how much hours your instances are up. Even you have no traffic, you may be billed.