# AWS Elastic Load Balancing Canonical: https://inetgeek.com/load-balancing/aws-elb/ AWS's load balancers, billed per balancer-hour plus a capacity-unit charge whose rate depends on the type. ## Who it suits Balancing traffic that already lives in AWS, where the balancer reaches EC2, containers, Lambda and IP targets natively. $0.0225 an hour plus capacity, billed only on whichever dimension you actually use most rather than on all of them at once. Consider something else if You want a bill you can forecast. The capacity unit is four dimensions at once — connections per second, active connections, rules and gigabytes — and the one that governs your charge can change with traffic shape rather than traffic volume. ## iScore 50 / 100 (80% interval 41–60), rank 2 of 4 in load-balancing — interval overlaps the next rank, so this is an ordering, not a finding. inetGeek's own reading, computed from sourced facts against category peers by disclosed rules. Not a provider claim. Intervals are 80%; a provider with few documented facts is pulled toward the category middle rather than scored on what little is known. Method: https://inetgeek.com/iscore/. Full output with every criterion's basis: https://inetgeek.com/scores.json. Every load-balancing peer ranked: https://inetgeek.com/load-balancing/aws-elb/alternatives/ - Price: 31 (25–38), weight 36%, 0 of 2 criteria scored; scored for peers, not here — undocumented or stated without a number or a yes/limited/no: free_card_required, minimum_paid_price - Capacity and limits: 50 (17–83), weight 29%, 0 of 1 criteria scored; scored for peers, not here — undocumented or stated without a number or a yes/limited/no: regions - Trust and compliance: 50 (44–56), weight 21%, 1 of 1 criteria scored - Evidence: 100 (100–100), weight 14%, 4 of 4 criteria scored ## What the documentation says ### Pricing - Entry paid plan: $0.0225 per load balancer-hour in us-east-1, charged for partial hours too, plus capacity units on top. There is no plan and no free allowance for the balancer itself — it bills from the hour it exists, whether traffic arrives or not. ([source](https://pricing.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/offers/v1.0/aws/AWSELB/current/us-east-1/index.json), read 2026-09-15) - Pricing model: Per load balancer-hour plus per capacity-unit-hour, and the capacity rate depends on which balancer you run: $0.008 per LCU-hour for an Application Load Balancer, $0.006 for a Network Load Balancer, and $0.008 per GB processed on the older Classic balancers. Reserving capacity in advance is cheaper per unit than using it on demand. ([source](https://pricing.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/offers/v1.0/aws/AWSELB/current/us-east-1/index.json), read 2026-09-15) - Egress over allowance: $0.008 per GB processed on a Classic Load Balancer. Application and Network balancers do not bill data separately — throughput folds into the capacity unit instead, at 1 GB per hour per LCU to EC2 targets — so there is one published per-GB rate here and it applies to the oldest of the three products. ([source](https://pricing.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/offers/v1.0/aws/AWSELB/current/us-east-1/index.json), read 2026-09-15) ### Infrastructure - Uptime SLA: 99.99% monthly uptime for a Multi-AZ Load Balancer — one spread across two or more availability zones. A balancer in a single zone is not covered by that commitment. ([source](https://aws.amazon.com/elasticloadbalancing/sla/), read 2026-09-15) ### Inference - Rate limits: One capacity unit covers 25 new connections per second, 3,000 active connections per minute (1,500 with Mutual TLS), and 1 GB per hour to EC2, container or IP targets — 0.4 GB per hour to Lambda. You are charged only on whichever of those dimensions you use most, not on all of them, and the first 10 rule evaluations are free. ([source](https://aws.amazon.com/elasticloadbalancing/pricing/), read 2026-09-15) ## Compared with - [AWS Elastic Load Balancing vs Google Cloud Load Balancing](https://inetgeek.com/compare/aws-elb-vs-google-cloud-load-balancing/) - [AWS Elastic Load Balancing vs Cloudflare Load Balancing](https://inetgeek.com/compare/aws-elb-vs-cloudflare-load-balancing/) - [AWS Elastic Load Balancing vs DigitalOcean Load Balancers](https://inetgeek.com/compare/aws-elb-vs-digitalocean-load-balancer/)