I believe I'm in the right section of stack exchange to ask this. If not, let me know.

I only use Amazon Web Services for temporary type hosting services, so the spot instances are quite valuable to me. I would also just make an instance and start and stop it - but - that doesn't necessarily fit my bootstrapped budget sadly.

Anyways, it really kills me when someone outbids me on a spot instance I have (I tend to go for the larger ones which there are fewer of available) and I get randomly kicked off. I know or at least I believe there is a way to program in something somehow to dynamically change your bidding price to beat a potential competitor's if their's is higher than yours.

Now, I previously believed Amazon would just charge me for the highest price right above the next lowest competitor automatically (eliminating the need for this) - so if I bid too high, then I only pay what I would of needed to in order to win and keep the auction. Essentially, I thought my bid price was my max bid price.

Apparently, according to my bills and several experiments I've done - this is not the case. They charge me for whatever I bid even when I know there is no one else around to counter bid me.

I needed to clarify that, but let me get back to the main point:

Let's say I'm bidding $0.50, competitor comes in and bids 0.55 cents. I get kicked off. I want to have it to where I'd set a maximum I'm willing to pay (let's say $1.00 here), and then when competitor comes in and tries to bid $.55, my bid is dynamically adjusted to beat his at $0.56 up until he breaks my $1.00 threshold.

I've been reading the guides and although they are more or less straightforward, I feel like they leave a few holes in them that end up confusing me. Like, for instance, where do I input said command or when do I do it? Maybe I'm just tech illiterate and need help deciphering these guides.

A good start for someone willing to answer/help me decipher this problem would be here: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/spot-as-update-bid.html