Battery energy storage systems (BESSs) can provide instantaneous support for frequency regulation (FR) because of their fast response characteristics. However, purely pursuing a better FR effect calls for continually rapid cycles of BESSs, which shortens their lifetime and deteriorates the operational economy. To coordinate the lifespan savings and the FR effect, this paper presents a control strategy for the FR of BESSs based on fuzzy logic and hierarchical controllers. The fuzzy logic controller improves the effect of FR by adjusting the charging/discharging power of the BESS with a higher response speed and precision based on the area control error (ACE) signal and the change rate of ACE in a non-linear way. Hierarchical controllers effectively reduce the life loss by optimizing the depth of discharge, which ensures that the state of charge (SOC) of BESS is always in the optimal operating range, and the total FR cost is the lowest at this time. The proposed method can achieve the optimal balance between ACE reduction and operational economy of BESS. The effectiveness of the proposed strategy is verified in a two-area power system.