Amazon CloudFront Costs: Idle Distributions and Cache Misses
A CloudFront distribution is either serving traffic or it is not. The cost questions are about misses, idle distributions and plan choice.
How CloudFront is paid for
CloudFront now has two pricing routes. On pay-as-you-go, each service involved is billed separately on actual usage. Flat-rate plans bundle the CDN with WAF, DDoS protection, DNS, certificates, logging and edge compute into a fixed monthly price with no overage charges.
A distribution has no running compute of its own to switch off, so a time-of-day schedule is not a lever here. The closest thing to “off” is disabling a distribution, which AWS requires before deletion, and a disabled distribution stops accepting traffic for its alternate domain names (delete guide). A distribution on a flat-rate plan cannot be deleted until the plan is cancelled and the billing cycle ends.
Where the money goes on a distribution
Every cache miss becomes a fetch from the origin. On pay-as-you-go that fetch is transfer you pay for on top of the edge delivery, so a low hit ratio makes the same page views cost more. The other waste pattern is simpler: distributions created for a launch, a test or a migration that no longer receive requests.
ZopNight’s CloudFront rules
- Idle CloudFront Distribution fires only when the Requests metric covers the full window and shows zero requests, and prices the distribution’s cost as recoverable on disable or delete.
- CloudFront Low Cache Hit Ratio fires when the 30-day average cache hit rate is below 80% and a real cache-miss origin egress cost can be computed. The saving is capped at the distribution’s own cost.
Both appear on the Recommendations page with the metrics that triggered them, so you can see the request series or the hit rate before deciding. Nothing is changed on the distribution by ZopNight’s discovery or recommendations; they work on a read-only connection.
Around the distribution
Most CloudFront bills sit next to an S3 origin or a load balancer. Storage behind the CDN is covered on the S3 page, and the general transfer picture on data transfer costs.
For origin behaviour and hit-ratio tracking see the CloudFront origin fact sheet, and for every AWS rule in one place, AWS recommendations.