Cheapest Spot & Preemptible Cloud Instances
Find the lowest-priced Spot, Preemptible, and Interruptible cloud instances across AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and Alibaba Cloud for fault-tolerant workloads.
Executive Summary & Quick Answer
Compare Spot instance discounts across AWS, Azure, GCP, and Alibaba Cloud for up to 90% savings.
Architecture & Deployment Guide
Spot instances are excess cloud datacenter capacity offered at 60% to 90% discounts. When the provider needs capacity back, instances receive a short termination warning (30s to 2min).
Cost Optimization Strategies
- ✓Diversify across multiple instance families (e.g. c6i, c7g, m6i) and multiple availability zones to minimize interruption rates.
- ✓Design workloads to be stateless and checkpoint state regularly to cloud object storage.
- ✓Use Spot instances for batch data processing, AI training/evaluation, rendering, and web scraping.
Recommended Compute Instances for Cheapest Spot & Preemptible Cloud Instances
Verified compute instances meeting the recommended 4 vCPU / 8 GiB RAM baseline.
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Hardware Specification Tiers
Starts around $3.50 to $6.00/month on standard clouds, or under €4.00/month on Hetzner and Scaleway.
Prices range from ~€4.50/mo on Hetzner to ~$24.00/mo on DigitalOcean and ~$28.00-$35.00/mo on AWS EC2 on-demand.
Hetzner starts around €10.00-€12.00/month, compared to $48.00/month on DigitalOcean and $60.00-$70.00/month on AWS/GCP on-demand.
Starts around €18.00-€24.00/month on Hetzner and $90.00-$120.00/month on hyperscalers.
Frequently Asked Questions
Direct answers to common cloud compute pricing and infrastructure questions.
How much cheaper are Spot instances than On-Demand? ▼
AWS, Azure, and GCP Spot instances offer between 60% and 91% discounts compared to standard on-demand pricing.