S3 buckets with Transfer Acceleration switched on but little accelerated traffic to justify it

What the accelerated endpoint charges

S3 Transfer Acceleration routes transfers through CloudFront edge locations to speed up long-distance uploads and downloads. It only applies to requests sent to the bucket-name.s3-accelerate.amazonaws.com endpoint; the regular endpoints keep working as before. The S3 pricing page lists the surcharge on top of normal data transfer: $0.04 per GB for uploads accelerated through edge locations in the United States, Europe and Japan, $0.08 per GB through all other edge locations, and $0.04 per GB for accelerated downloads and inter-Region transfers. AWS does not charge when it judges that acceleration would not have been faster for a given upload.

So leaving acceleration enabled is not a cost in itself. The cost comes from clients using the accelerated endpoint for transfers that gain nothing, for example traffic from the same Region.

Seeing which buckets have acceleration on

for b in $(aws s3api list-buckets --query 'Buckets[].Name' --output text); do
  echo "$b $(aws s3api get-bucket-accelerate-configuration --bucket $b --query Status --output text)"
done

For the buckets showing Enabled, search application configuration, SDK settings and upload tools for the s3-accelerate endpoint to see who actually uses it.

What ZopNight reads

ZopNight records whether Transfer Acceleration is enabled on each bucket. That tells it where the lever exists, but not how many bytes went through the accelerated endpoint.

Why no finding is ever shown

A dollar figure would need accelerated gigabytes per bucket. CloudWatch byte metrics do not separate accelerated from regular traffic, and per-resource cost data does not break it out by usage type, so ZopNight has no reliable source for it. Rather than show a $0 recommendation or a guess, the rule raises no finding on any bucket. Treat this page as a checklist for your own review.

What you would save

saving = accelerated GB per month x acceleration surcharge per GB ($0.04 or $0.08)

Normal data transfer charges still apply after acceleration is suspended; only the surcharge goes.

Suspending acceleration on a bucket

1. Find the clients using the accelerated endpoint and confirm they do not need it.
2. Point them at the regular regional endpoint.
3. Suspend acceleration, which requires s3:PutAccelerateConfiguration: aws s3api put-bucket-accelerate-configuration --bucket my-bucket --accelerate-configuration Status=Suspended
4. Re-enable it later with Status=Enabled if long-distance upload volume grows; AWS notes it can take up to 20 minutes before speeds improve after enabling.