Release an Amazon EC2 Dedicated Host - Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud

Release an Amazon EC2 Dedicated Host

If you no longer need Dedicated Host, you can stop the instances running on the host, direct them to launch on a different host, and then release the host.

Any running instances on the Dedicated Host must be stopped before you can release the host. These instances can be migrated to other Dedicated Hosts in your account so that you can continue to use them. These steps apply only to On-Demand Dedicated Hosts.

You can release a Dedicated Host using the following methods.

Console
To release a Dedicated Host

  1. Open the Amazon EC2 console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/.

  2. In the navigation pane, choose Dedicated Hosts.

  3. On the Dedicated Hosts page, select the Dedicated Host to release.

  4. Choose Actions, Release host.

  5. To confirm, choose Release.

AWS CLI
To release a Dedicated Host

Use the release-hosts AWS CLI command.

aws ec2 release-hosts --host-ids h-012a3456b7890cdef
PowerShell
To release a Dedicated Host

Use the Remove-EC2Hosts AWS Tools for Windows PowerShell command.

PS C:\> Remove-EC2Hosts -HostId h-012a3456b7890cdef

After you release a Dedicated Host, you can't reuse the same host or host ID again, and you are no longer charged On-Demand billing rates for it. The state of the Dedicated Host is changed to released, and you are not able to launch any instances onto that host.

Note

If you have recently released Dedicated Hosts, it can take some time for them to stop counting towards your limit. During this time, you might experience LimitExceeded errors when trying to allocate new Dedicated Hosts. If this is the case, try allocating new hosts again after a few minutes.

The instances that were stopped are still available for use and are listed on the Instances page. They retain their host tenancy setting.