Difficulty: Easy
Description
AWS Transfer Family bills an hourly endpoint fee for every enabled protocol (SFTP, FTPS, FTP, AS2) for as long as a server is in the ONLINE state — completely independent of whether any files actually move through it. A server that is online with protocols enabled but sees no upload/download activity (and often no configured users) therefore accrues a flat recurring fee for nothing. Deleting an idle server eliminates that endpoint fee entirely, with no impact on any active workload because there is none.
Selection Criteria
The Transfer Family server is in the
ONLINEstate (provisioned and accruing the hourly endpoint fee).Over the trailing 31 settled days, the server shows ~$0 of DataTransfer cost/usage (no
UploadBytes/DownloadBytes) — i.e. no actual transfer activity.The server has no recent activity in other billable categories (AS2 inbound/outbound messages, PGP decrypt, SFTP connector, web app hours).
The server's annualized
ProtocolHoursfee exceeds a minimum threshold, so the cleanup is worth acting on.Supporting idle signal: service-managed servers with 0 configured users (
user_count = 0).
Expected Saving
Deleting an idle server removes 100% of its endpoint hourly fee — the saving is deterministic, not an estimated fraction. AWS bills each enabled protocol per provisioned hour (≈ $0.30/hr in us-east-1, ≈ $216 per protocol per month), so a single online SFTP-only idle server costs on the order of ~$2,600/year doing nothing; servers with multiple protocols enabled multiply that. The credited figure is the server's annualized ProtocolHours cost taken directly from the CUR (net unblended cost, preserving the tenant's negotiated discount), not a list-price guess.
Example: an ONLINE SFTP server with zero users and ~$0 data transfer over the last 31 days, billing ~$18/day in ProtocolHours, yields roughly $6,500/year in pure waste — recovered in full by deleting it.
Note: The saving credited is the flat endpoint fee only. Idle servers have ~$0 data transfer by definition, so excluding data-transfer charges keeps the estimate conservative and accurate.
Operational Impact
✅ Immediate billing stop — deleting an online server ends the per-protocol hourly charge right away; the recurring fee disappears from the next billing period.
⚠️ Destructive and not reversible — deletion removes the server's endpoint, hostname, and host keys. Any client, DNS record, or automation pointing at it will break, and a recreated server gets a new endpoint and host key. Confirm the server is genuinely unused (no users, no DNS, no scheduled jobs) before deleting.
⚠️ Lower-risk alternative — if the server may be needed again, stopping it instead of deleting preserves its configuration; verify the current billing behavior for stopped servers before relying on it for savings.