Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS
amazonlightsail.com
amazonlightsail.com
One big "gotcha" for AWS newbies which I cannot tell if this addresses: Does this set or allow the user to set a cost ceiling?
AWS have offered billing alerts since forever. They'll also occasionally refund unexpected expenses (one time thing). But they've never offered a hard "suspend my account" ceiling that a lot of people with limited budgets have asked for.
They claim this is a competitor for Digital Ocean, but with DO what they say they charge is what they actually charge. I'm already seeing looking through the FAQ various ways for this to exceed the supposed monthly charges listed on the homepage (and no way to stop that).
Why even offer a service like this if you cannot GUARANTEE that the $5 they say they charge is all you'll ever get charged? How is this different from AWS if a $5 VPS can cost $50, or $500?
That's what Amazon is missing. People want ironclad guarantees about how much this can cost under any and all circumstances. I'd welcome an account suspend instead of bill shock.
The storage is cheap as balls but the transfer can fuck you.
no one with frequent high volume retrieval needs would be advised to use glacier.
It feels like the larger thing they're trying to solve, that I expect actually stops the majority of people who don't choose AWS, is the complexity around setting up VPCs/SecurityGroups/Subnets/etc.
Most providers in the VPS space already charge overages for bandwidth, and most of them don't support suspending the account vs just billing you.
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/awsaccountbilling/latest/aboutv2...
I am currently using Linode, but would move to AWS if they offer a cap. 2 years ago I signed up for the free AWS and forgot about it (didn't use it at all). Ended up costing ~60$ before I found out and since then I've avoided it.
Setting cost caps on more complex applications that use a lot of different AWS services would get complex in a hurry and could easily have unintended effects.
As someone else wrote, I view this as primarily a simple VPS for people who are already using AWS for other things. I suspect that AWS isn't really interested in being a VPS-only provider for the most price-sensitive customers.
The big question here is what to do with stateful data. Would you accept an immediate deletion of all of your S3 data? RDS instances and snapshots?
They could easily cut off public access to those resources while charging you storage fees. Obviously with any kind of ceiling there are certain details that need to be ironed out (i.e. most people wouldn't want configuration information or data to be lost, but they likely would want VPS to be taken offline and other services to be suspended).
Ultimately for most startups, small businesses, and individual developers being able to say "My AWS bill cannot exceed $1000, period" is a powerful tool. Right now if a billing alert fires at 1am, you may not see it until 9am and by then you're already in huge trouble.
Lambda isn't available in all zones, and not everyone has the time/ability/knowledge to set up such a thing. I'm sure I could do it, but only if I were to spend a few hours researching it, and probably a few nights working on such a solution. I'd also have to trust that I didn't mess it up -- I'd hate to have a bunch of traffic and NOT properly prevent the traffic.
This is the kind of thing that Amazon surely could provide easily if they wanted to.
It's like if your phone company didn't give you an option to limit your spending (prepaid), but said that you could use their arcane API to tell them each month to start/stop service. That's great, but not really very nice to customers.
The monthly budget cap should be allocated to existing storage first. This covers the existing data for the next month. If there is any free limit left, it could be used for new data writes + 1 month of storage, and/or running services. Once the limit is reached, then writes are blocked and services stopped.
The only situation where you would need to delete data is if you want to set a new monthly budget that is lower than your existing monthly storage-only bill - but the UI could just disallow this.
From FAQ:
> What do Lightsail static IPs cost?
> They're free in Lightsail, as long as you are using them! You don't pay for a static IP if it is attached to an instance. Public IPs are a scarce resource and Lightsail is committed to helping to use them efficiently, so we charge a small $0.005/hour fee for static IPs not attached to an instance for more than 1 hour.
That's $3.60/month... seems similar to mail-in rebates—many people forget, and accidentally give Amazon some (mostly) free money.
Also, from later in this thread:
> FWIW, bandwidth overages at Linode and DO are $0.02 per GB, LightSail is $0.09.
It's these seemingly-tiny (but not-so-tiny when I'm running 60-70 VPSes) costs that kill when you get your first bill after a large traffic event.
Is there?
And this is exactly why we're running out of publically available IPv4 addresses.
Will stick with Linode.
The only bad experience I had was with SES - we got blocked by high bounce rate, sending to a test email that did not exist (specifically because it was a test email). It took two days for the special unblock team to unblock us, even though the general support guy I was talking to had responded a couple of times in that wait period.
The right thing to do is to just discount the product and just re-use IPs unless otherwise reserved. Mail in rebates can be ignored or "lost in the mail" and seems to happen often enough for me to have lost trust in them. I have little control over what the vendor does, so I would rather avoid vendors who think screwing with me is ok.
I don't buy products with mail in rebates and now I won't buy into lightsail (Presume this thread is accurate and Amazon doesn't fix it).
They don't for traffic. So you do run a small risk of something happening.
However, Linode at least pools your VPSs so if you have 100 of them and 20 of them "go over" the cap you still are often okay because of the other 80 that didn't "go over".
The truth is none of these providers provide truly hard caps. The difference is with Amazon/Google/Azure/etc you can realistically get hit with a 4 figure bill if something goes seriously wrong.
DO/Linode/Vultr I've never seen accidental "mistakes" causing that sort of thing and even an active dos/ddos attack that would cost you more than $100 in overages before they started null routing you.
> due to the shortage of IPv4 addresses available, we charge $0.006 per hour for addresses that have been reserved but not assigned to a Droplet. In order to keep things simple, you will not be charged unless you accrue $1 or more.
The Zeno's paradox in action - once you reach half your limit, the speed is cut in half. "Zeno" throttling if you will. :)
This applies to any other provider, too. What you owe the provider is what you contracted to pay the provider (eg. by consuming services, or clicking the "upgrade" button in a web interface). It is independent of them actually taking the money.
limited liability, can't really beat it
amazon could completely negate this risk by requiring pre-payment for small/unknown operators, which is something a lot of people (myself included) desperately want them to provide.
I'm sure they've done their sums here, and have figured out the increased revenue from customers not being able to set a budget is more than their potential losses from deadbeats
the variable costs are basically zero, after all ( bandwidth and CPU time are worthless if not utilised)
The only overage charge I see is for data transfer. This isn't ideal, I'll grant you, but it's not the same as "various".
We've seen AWS accounts get broken into with stolen tokens, additional VPS's started, VPS upgraded, bandwidth consumed, etc. And while Amazon has been good with refunding the FIRST time, nobody wants to wake up to a 10K bill because your gitignore had a typo.
A ceiling or cap may even stop plan upgrades without an email confirmation. That would be hugely welcome, particularly in a world where bad guys are actively seeking out VPS to break into.
>For every Lightsail plan you use, we charge you the fixed hourly price, up to the maximum monthly plan cost.
Wording implies the monthly pricing is a 'maximum' price.
> Data transfer overages above the free allowance are charged at $0.09/GB.
On the $5 instance the second TB (at $90) is 18 times as expensive as the instance itself with the first TB included.
Edit: just did some research, there are many cases this isn't true
Hetzner charges 1.36€ per Terabyte of traffic, and with most servers, gives you 10-20TB included.
I’ve heard people talk about the ridiculous traffic costs of AWS, but this is an entirely new dimension of expensive.
That amount of traffic is more than 2000 EUR per month at AWS. Of course this is comparing entirely different things, but still, if you have significant traffic and can't avoid it with a CDN or something like that, AWS (as well as Google and Microsoft clouds) get seriously expensive.
Plus there's nothing stopping someone breaking into your account and upgrading it in all kinds of evil ways (which has been a huge hassle with AWS tokens being stolen from e.g. Github).
Via some accidental clicking in the control panel (trying to get an IP address for the instance, I think?) I ended up getting a bill from them for over $100. Which, to me at the time, was a huge amount of money.
It put me off of AWS forever. I don't ever want something that tells me how much they're going to charge me after I have already given them my credit card information.
edit: they did credit me back when I complained, but that doesn't matter. The risk to me wasn't/isn't worth it.
One of my services had a Google BigQuery "budget" set at $100. One of our test machines went haywire and continuously submitted a bunch of jobs. The "budget" turned out only to be an alarm, and even that they sent us 8 hours late, after $1600 of charges had been racked up. I responded in 20 minutes and shut it down. Google insisted we pay the full bill. After I wrote up a blog post on the situation and had the "publish" button warmed up, they finally relented and refunded us for the amount of time their alarm was delayed. Absolutely ridiculous that's not their policy to begin with...
For a company that supposedly puts the customer first, this is appalling.
There are a number of resource types that, simply by existing, will accrue costs. A lot of them, actually. On AWS that includes things like running EC2 instances, EBS volumes, RDS databases and backups, DynamoDB tables, data in S3 buckets, and more. The question is what should happen to these resources upon hitting a billing ceiling?
Should EC2 instances be terminated (which deletes all data on them), DynamoDB tables deleted, S3 data erased, RDS databases deleted? If that was the behavior, it would be an extremely dangerous feature to enable, and could lead to catastrophically bad customer experiences. This is a nonstarter for any serious user.
Conversely, if you expect those resources to continue to exist and continue operating, then that's basically expecting the cloud provider to pay your bill. The provider will then have to recoup those costs from other customers somehow, and so this option sets poor incentives and isn't fair to others. If you expect your account to remain open the following month, you'd have to settle the bill, and we're back to square one.
AWS gives people tools to tackle this problem, such as billing alerts. These can notify you over SMS, email, or programmatically when you hit an "$X this month" billing threshold, and then you can decide what to do. Since these events can be processed programmatically, it's possible to build a system that will automatically take whatever action you'd like AWS to take, such as shutting things down or deleting resources.
If you think all of this through, it's really hard to come up with an approach to billing limits that's fair and a good experience, so I think it's reasonable for cloud providers to give billing threshold alerts while leaving the choice of what to do in the hands of the customer.
Citation Required
So maybe a couple of EC2 instances go down, but you pay for and keep S3, Dynamo, etc. At least enough to salvage or implement a contingency. You'd still owe Amazon the money.
It's tempting to wonder why Amazon would incur that risk, but it is a risk already inherent to their post-pay model, and it serves as good faith mitigation to the runaway cost risk that is currently borne by the customer.
Not perfect, but maybe a compromise.
Let's take a simplistic example and say you're paying per gigabyte. You decide you're willing to pay up to $X, and Amazon tells you ahead of time how much your $X will buy you, and you accept.
One type of customer will be using that storage to store priceless customer photos. Even if the customer ends up deleting the photos, it has to be your customer who makes that decision - not you, and not Amazon. You tell Amazon that you'd like an alarm at $X-$Y, but that if you hit $X, keep going, at least until you hit $X+$Z.
Another type of customer will be using it to store a cache copy (for quicker retrieval) of data backed up in a data warehouse somewhere. You tell Amazon that you'd like a policy which automatically deletes all the oldest data, to guarantee to stay under the limit.
Yet another type of customer would rather keep their old data and just return an error code to the user for stuffing too much new data into too little storage, so basically, guarantee to stay under the limit, and guarantee never to delete data.
You can't solve billing until you communicate with your customers and ask what they want.
So lets for a moment assume you talked to a large cohort of customers, and found a bunch of "types" including those three you list and many many more (inevitably, at AWS's scale).
You then need to make some business decisions about which of those "types" are most important to you, and which are way less profitable to spend time addressing.
So of course you solve the big pain points for your customers spending tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars per month before you prioritise the customers worried abou going over a tens or hundreds of dollars a month budget.
What would that solution look like? It'd have ways for customers with hundreds or thousands of services (virtual servers, databases, storage, etc) to make all their own decisions about alarms, alerts, cost ceilings - and tools to let them decide how to respond to costs, how to manage their data availability, how to manage capacity, when to shut down services or limit scaling, what can and cannot be deleted from storage. It would also 100% need to allow for practically unbounded capacity/costs for customers who need that (Think AliExpress on their "Single's Day" event where they processed $1 billion in sales in 5 minutes.) All this would need - for the $100k+/month customers - to be machine drivable and automateable, with extensive monitoring and reliable alerting mechanisms - and the ability to build as much reliability and availability into the alerting/reporting/monitoring system and the automated provisioning and deprovisioning systems as each customer needs.
And at least to a first approximation - we've just invented 70% of the AWS ecosystem.
You might think Amazon don't cater to people who want hard $5 or $70 per month upper limits on their spending. You're _mostly_ right. There are many other people playing in that space, and it's _clearly_ not a high priority for Amazon to complete for the pennies a month available in the race-to-the-bottom webhosting that people like GoDaddy sell for $12/year.
The thing to think about is - "who does Amazon consider to be 'their customers'?". I think you'll find for the accounts spending 7 figures a year with AWS - billing _is_ "solved". The rest of us are on the loss-leader path (quite literally for the "free tier" accounts) - because Amazon only need to turn a few tenths or hundredths of a percent of "little accounts" into "their customers" for it all to work out as spectacularly profitably as it is doing right now.
Except that that's what this announcement is.
Which makes me think this may be AZON's fix to runaway billing - if you don't have the resources to pay for mistakes[1], stay in the per-month kiddie pool and don't play with the heavy machinery.
[1] I started to add, "or trust yourself not to make them", but that's silly, because mistakes will happen.
Let's assume, based on the evidence at hand, that Amazon is rolling out Amazon Lightsail, and that as such, they're willing to do work (create business plans and write software) to court the $5/month market. In that case, it's a relevant comment for people to write "I can afford $5/month, or even $20, but I can't afford unlimited liability, even with what I know about AWS customer service, so I cannot use this product." It's relevant because it suggests that there's anxiety that is preventing uptake, which can be solved by a combination of writing software and internally committing themselves to eat the loss if the software is imperfect (as others have said, stopping service actually-on-time is actually harder than it sounds, but the provider can always just eat the loss, invisibly to the seller).
Your (probably-correct) observation that Amazon doesn't really care about the penny-ante user's money (in the short term) is beside the point.
Most companies will hold onto your data for a time, then delete it afterwards.
This doesn't smell like technical concerns to me. It smells like sneaky Amazon-wants-to-make-more-money concerns.
(<snarky> What's a gallon of milk on the shelf really cost Walmart? And how much of it is opportunity cost? If I usually buy 2 gallons a week - why can't I keep taking home a gallon every few days for a month or so after I stop paying, then cut me off afterwards? Sounds like a sneaky Walmart-wants-to-make-more-money concern.)
If only Walmart would have a process in place to notice that I was ordering a spectacular and unusual amount of milk and save us all the trouble.
So my local Walmart has a Netflix guy who gets 1000 trailers of milk twice a day, and the Dropbox and Yelp guys get a few hundred trailers a week each - and I know these guys from when I see them at the other Walmart in the next town over buying the same sort of amounts there as well. There's people like the Obama campaign who we'd never seen before who fairly quickly ramped up from a gallon a day to a pallet a day, then jumped straight to 50 trailerloads a week for a six months, then stopped buying milk completely one day.
What's considered "normal", "unusual", or "spectacular" - and to whom?
Plenty of companies operate like that, and e.g. require purchase order ids and accompanying maximum spends issued for any expense over X, where X can be very low. I've worked for companies where it was 0 - every expense, no matter how low, needed prior approval from the CEO or finance director. Not just tiny companies either - one of the strictest such policies I've dealt with was with a company of more than a hundred employees.
Amazon AWS's "important customers" are not "fallible human beings" who plan to keep their monthly spend under $100. They'd perfectly happily inconvenience thousands of those users in favour of their customers who _do_ need solar system scalability.b(And, to their credit, there's an abundance of stories around of people on typically 2 digit monthly spends who screw up and get a 4 digit bill shock - which Amazon reverse when called up and pleaded with.)
So they built their thing as "default unlimited". Because of course you would in their position - follow the money. When Netfix wants 10,000 more servers - they want it to "just work", not have them need to call support or uncheck some "cost safety" checkbox.
If you need "default cheap", AWS isn't the right tool for you. You can 100% build "default cheap" platforms on AWS if you've got the time/desire (well, down in the "I can ensure I don't go over ~$100/month - it's not real easy to configure AWS to keep costs down in the $5/month class - the monitoring and response system needs about twice that to keep running reliably).
I sometimes don't think people (especially peope who "grew up" in their dev career with "the cloud") understand just what an amazing tool AWS is - and the fact that they make it available to people like me for hobby projects or half-arsed prototype ideas still amazes me. I remember flying halfway round the world with a stack of several hundred meg hard drives in my carry on - catching a cab from the airport to PAIX so I could open up the servers we owned, and add in the drives with photos of 60,000 hotels and a hardened and tested OS upgrade. Buying those 4 servers and the identical local setup for dev/testing, getting them installed at PAIX, and flying from Sydney to California to upgrade them was probably $30+ thousand bucks and 3 months calendar time. Now I can do all that and more with one Ansible script from my laptop - or by pointing and clicking their web interface.
AWS is an _amazing_ tool - talk to some grey-beards about it some time if you don't remember how it used to get done.But the old saying holds: "With great power comes great responsibility." If you don't want to accept the responsibility, use a tool with less power. Don't for a minute think Amazon are going to put a "Ensure I don't spend as much money with AWS as I might otherwise" option in there - if there's _any_ chance of it meaning a deep-pocketed customer _ever_ gets a false positive denial from it. (WHich, now I think about it - makes this new Lightsail thing make so much more sense...)
Also how our are analogies alike? Milk is a consumable, data is information. Completely different usage pattern.
Finally, every internet service provider I've ever used that held data for some reason granted me a grace period, even if it was never officially stated. Sometimes you just have to ask nicely
When a customer's ceiling is reached, their mix of services goes into limp mode. Things slow down, degrade, maybe become unavailable, depending on each service's "freeze model". Alarms ring. SMS messages are sent to emergency phone numbers. The customer is given a description of the problem and an opportunity to solve it -- raise the cap or cut services.
So wouldn't this cost Amazon money? Sure, but that's a cost of doing business. And as others in the thread have pointed out, the actual costs to Amazon are surely much lower than the "loss" they're incurring by not unquestioningly billing the customer. Especially since Amazon often refunds large surprise bills anyway.
If this were the official policy -- no dickering required -- there's a definite cohort of risk- and uncertainty-averse customers who would be willing to start using Amazon (or switch back).
That's what stopping instances _is_ already. You don't get charged for stopped instances which is a defining feature of Amazon's cloud. Very few providers actually offer this. Most just charge away for the compute even if the instances are powered off, Azure being one exception.
This whole "spin up compute and get charged a minimal amount when not in usage, but keep your working environment" model was pioneered by Amazon.
> So wouldn't this cost Amazon money? Sure, but that's a cost of doing business.
Why would Amazon spend a bunch of money, so that they can charge customers _less_ money, in order to keep customers who are cheapskates, and/or won't take the time to learn the platform properly?
I've seen engineering teams hand out accounts to support teams for testing, and since the resources are not under the purview of the dev team things go unnoticed until someone gets the bill. Arguably there are better ways to handle these requirements, but it'd be nice if you could force people down the path of setting billing alerts because these individuals don't always realize that they are spending money.
But, they don't don't give us the choice. I need to keep an eye every moment of every day for an alarm, as hundreds or thousands of dollars rack up. That's the ONE THING I DON'T WANT. I'd take anything else (delete my data, lock everything, whatever) over charging me money I can't afford to pay.
I think it would be reasonable to put everything into a no access / deep freeze mode, until I pay up and choose to unfreeze. Would it cost Amazon that much to just keep my data locked for a couple of weeks while I sort out my storage? I'd even be happy for a reserved $100 or so to pay for keeping the storage going.
You know you can make a machine do that for you - right?
In fact all the tools Amazon would use to do this are available to you right now. Cloudwatch, SNS, and Lambda are 98% likely to be all you need - apart from the time to get it set up to do whatever you think is "the right thing".
This seems like the kind of thing you really want to get right, and it will be (I imagine) hard to get right. If it was easy, I would expect some company to offer it (along with, of course, a guarantee that if they mess it up, they will pay my bill).
Nobody rings up Caterpillar and complains about the costs of leasing/running/maintaining a D9 'dozer if they're doing jobs that only need a shovel and a wheelbarrow.
Tools for the job. AWS might not be the tool you need. Or might not be the tool you need _yet_.
But.
There's nothing "unexpected" or "unagreed beforehand" about Amazon's pricing or costs either. You order a medium EC2 instance and we all know exactly what the bill per hour will be.
There's nothing unexpected or un agreed beforehand about the ordering/provisioning process. You ask AWS to start one, they'll start one. You tell them to stop it, they'll stop it. You get charged the known agreed upon rate for the hours you run it. You ask for 10, you get 10. There's even checks in place - the first time you ask for 50, you hit a limit which you need to speak to them to get raised before you can get a larger than previously seem bill.
Same with your earthmoving gear. You ring up for prices and they'll say "$200/day for a bobcat, $2500/day for a D9 - includes free delivery in The Bay Area!"
If you need one bobcat for one day at 10 Infinite Loop, Cupertino - and click their web order form and say you want 10 D9s for one day at 1 Infinite Loop, Cupertino (and happily click thru all the never-read the web interface confirmations) - you should 100% expect to get a bill for $25k, as well as dealing with clearing up after parking 10 'dozers in Apple's parking lot.
This is not "unexpected". From the vendor's perspective $25k is not "massive". You knew and agreed to the prices and had every opportunity to calculate what your bill was going to be.
If you were only expecting a $200 bill - that's kinda on you. The earthmoving guy has heaps of other customers who spend many times that every single week - and they all started out as some guy who ordered a $200 bobcat or $25k's work of D9's as a one off. You are just another sale and another prospect in the top of the MRR funnel for him.
(Note: See holidayhole.com for a contemporary example of an unbounded earthmoving bill! ;-) )
The problem is someone putting up your hobby website on reddit when it's 2 in the morning your time, and you wake up the next day with a $10,000 bill.
Even heavy equipment rentals can result in large unexpected bills if you don't pay attention to what you're doing.
I need "reddit / DDos insurance"
You know exactly how much a paused EC2 instance charges you. The ceiling implementation could say, if the total amount charged so far this month, plus the cost of pausing the instance for the rest of the month, exceeds the ceiling, pause it now. So there's no data loss; the worst case is the customer's service is offline for the remainder of the month (or until they approve adding more money). At some point less than this number, start sending angry alerts. But you still have a hard cap that doesn't lose data.
It's not what a serious production user wants, but it's exactly what someone experimenting with AWS wants, either a running service that's looking at a cloud migration, or a new project/startup that hasn't launched yet.
Granted, for a big company, that amount may be so big it's unrealistic to ever hit it.
No one running a real business on AWS wants a hard ceiling instead of billing alerts and service by service throttling. Which Amazon has.
So, this is just the nuclear option for people's pet projects. It's not a bad thing to have but I wouldn't expect it to operate any differently than what would happen if you broke the TOS and they suspended your account.
Are you sure? I'd imagine many startups would rather take a few hours of downtime over billed thousands erroneously. The latter could easily mean the end of the company but the former, when you are just striking out is not the end of the world by far.
That's absurd. Of course there are businesses that want hard ceilings. Perhaps not on their production website[1], but on clusters handed over to engineers and whatnot for projects, experimentation, etc.? I've seen these things lay around for months before they were noticed.
[1] Maybe you don't consider startups 'real' enough, but I can totally imagine early stage startups wanting limits on their prod website, too. You can't save CPU cycles for later consumption.
I know startups that I could bankrupt with a few lines of code and a ~$60 server somewhere long before they'd be able to react to a billing alert if it wasn't for AWS being reasonably good about forgiving unexpected costs.
I'm not so sure no one running a "real business" would like a harder ceiling to avoid being at the mercy of how charitable AWS feels in those kinds of situations, or when a developer messes up a loop condition, or similar.
Perhaps not a 100% "stop everything costing money" option that'd involve deleting everything, but yes, some risks are existential enough that you want someone to figuratively pull the power plug out of your server on a seconds notice if you have the option.
If you can't afford downtime you probably can afford to wait for the alert and choose your own mitigation strategy. A system that can't tolerate downtime probably has an on-call rotation and these triggers ought to be reasonably fast.
If you can't react or can't afford to react, you probably can afford some downtime / data loss.
So the system doesn't need to have granular user defined controls. Just two modes. That was my point.
I think I triggered people with the phrase "real business" and I apologize for that.
Only a tiny fraction of businesses can't afford downtime. A lot of businesses claim they can't afford downtime, yet don't insure against it, and don't invest enough in high availability to be able to reasonably claim they've put in a decent effort to avoid it.
In most cases I've seen of businesses that claim they "can't afford downtime", they quickly balk if you present them with estimates of what it'd cost to even bring them to four or five nines of availability.
> A system that can't tolerate downtime probably has an on-call rotation and these triggers ought to be reasonably fast.
A lot of such systems can still run up large enough costs quickly enough that it's a major problem.
> If you can't react or can't afford to react, you probably can afford some downtime / data loss.
I'd say it is the opposite: Those who can afford to react are generally those with deep enough pockets to be able to weather an unexpected large bill best. Those who can't afford to react are often those in the worst position to handle both the unexpected bill and the downtime / data loss. But of the two, the potential magnitude of the loss caused by downtime is often far better bounded than the potential loss from a crazily high bill.
On the other hand, based on near-universal industry practice, there doesn't seem to be a huge demand for this. I suspect it may be better for everyone concerned to have heavy-duty users control their costs in various ways and for Amazon to refund money when things go haywire without bringing someone's service down.
Not saying Jevon's Paradox wouldn't kick in, but the friction of convincing businesses to work on tools to allow their customers to spend _less_ money is high.
One of the most amazing feats Amazon has pulled off is to convince people that AWS is cheap. They're cheap in the way that Apple are: Only if you need a feature-set (or name recognition..) that excludes the vast majority of the competitors from consideration. If/when you truly need that, then they're the right choice. There are plenty of valid reason to pick AWS.
But they're very rarely the cheap choice.
Yes, but that's a false comparison. It's cheaper to rent dedicated servers at any of several dozens large hosting providers than it is to use EC2 or S3, for example. For most people it's cheaper to rent racks and lease servers too (but depending on your location, renting dedicated servers somewhere else might be cheaper - e.g. racks in London are too expensive to compete with renting servers from Hetzner most of the time, for example).
It's extremely rare, and generally requires very specific needs, that AWS comes out cheap enough to even be witting batting range of dedicates solutions when I price out systems.
When clients pick AWS, it's so far never been because it's been cheap, but because they sometimes value the reputation or value the feature set, and that's a perfectly fine reason to pick AWS.
The point isn't that people shouldn't use AWS, but that if people thing AWS is cheap, in my experience it means they usually haven't costed out alternatives.
It's an amazing testament to the brand building and marketing department of Amazon more than anything else.
E.g. my object storage costs are 1/3 of AWS. My bandwidth costs are 1/50th or so of AWS prices.
There are valid reasons to use AWS depending on what exactly you do, but it's extremely rare for price to be one of them.
This is one of the fundamental things that make any sort of market work. If it's not safe to participate, people won't.
The real economic term for this is elastic demand (specifically, relatively elastic demand). For example, microprocessor cost reductions make new applications possible, thus demand increased so much that the total amount spent on microprocessors went up for decades. Example of inelastic demand is radial tires. They last four times as long as bias ply tires. But since this didn't cause people to drive four times further, the tire industry collapsed on the introduction of radial tires.
Does anyone know an example of an actual paradox? I've never found one, and I'm curious if they really exist.
Jevons's Paradox is about demand increasing for a resource when it becomes more efficient to use, e.g., someone invents an engine which can go twice as far with the same amount of fuel but instead of halving the demand for fuel the demand actually increases.
If I recall, elasticity of demand has to do with the relationship to supply. A very inelastic demand will cause people to consume the same rate no matter how much _supply_ is available. It doesn't have to do with the efficiency at which the resource is consumed like stated above. It's a subtle difference but I think they're actually quite distinct concepts.
Actual paradoxes are common. Just consider the classic: "This sentence is false".
As for your example, most sentences are neither true nor false. Nothing interesting has a probability of 0.000 or 1.000.
"This sentence is false" is clever use of language, may be interesting to sophomore philosophy students while smoking weed, but its not useful and there's nothing paradoxical about it.
> most sentences are neither true nor false. Nothing interesting has a probability of 0.000 or 1.000.
I'll start by observing that surely you're talking about propositions, not sentences, nor utterances. Or at least you ought to be.
But more significantly, I'll note that most propositions are either true or false (under a given interpretive framework), but that as epistemologically-unprivileged observers, we must assign empirical propositions probabilities that are higher than 0 and lower than 1. Propositions like "I am a fish" or "You hate meat" or "If Rosa hates meat then Alexis is a fish" are either true or false, under any given set of meanings for the constituent words (objects, predicates, etc). I'm curious what probability you think applies to propositions like "2 + 2 = 4" and "All triangles have 3 sides" and "All triangles have less than 11 sides". I think there are very many interesting propositions that differ from these only in degree of complexity (e.g. propositions about whether or not certain code, run on certain hardware, under certain enumerable assumptions about the runtime, will do certain things).
Based on your very strange claim that all interesting sentences have non-zero non-unity probability, perhaps you're saying that you find theorems uninteresting, and moreover are only interested in statements of empirical belief, such as "I put the odds of the sun failing to rise tomorrow lower than one in a billion." In that case, I cannot imagine what statement interest would qualify as a paradox, except perhaps insofar as some empirical statements of belief are "beyond strange".
"This sentence is false" is a paradox under pretty much everyone's notion of a paradox.
Those are great examples, thanks. All true, and there's nothing interesting about them.
And these things are exactly the sort of thing that "differ from [trivialities about triangles] only in degree of complexity".
Note that "all triangles have 3 sides" is probably an axiom, but "all triangles have less than 11 sides" is a trivial theorem.
If you need to dig this hard to find something interesting with a probability of 1, that's pretty good evidence that the vast majority of interesting statements are not of the true/false variety.
Although I don't find it interesting, I am open-minded enough to ... embrace.. the .. uh.. diversity of the world, that allows some people, to find that interesting.
The language that contains all Turing Machines that halt on all inputs is not decidable.
Or
e^(iy) = sin(y) + i * cos(y)
Are those uninteresting trivialities to you?
My hypothesis is that they don't really have it nailed down but given big margins they have they can afford to let you use more resources than you pay for in the end.
[1] https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/spending-limits/
There are a few Azure services to which the spending limit does not apply, but as long as you know what they are then you can choose to use them on your own volition.
One time we had literally 1 million cloudwatch metrics get created because we were monitoring mongodb databases and a CPAN test was creating test DBs and not deleting them and we were not ignoring dbs created with names like test_* when creating the metrics.
Another time an outside developer committed a root credential on a public repo in github to a (basically) unused amazon account.
Both times they refunded the costs. Not sure if that was because we were paying tens of thousands a month though to get this service though!
They have billing alerts ('beta') and used to offer a prepaid account type that they have discontinued for new customers (some may still have grandfathered accounts).
Closest thing now is the MSDN credit. It doesn't require a credit card and the account auto-suspends when you hit it. Problem with the MSDN credit is that it is for non-production only (and they reserve the right to kill anything they consider "production").
They should really offer prepaid again or bill caps. But Microsoft is too busy copying AWS to consider that they can do better than AWS.
They offer billing alerts, have a budget tracker thingy, but have no actual automated caps. Closest thing you can do is write one yourself using the AWS APIs.
Can it incur charges even if you've set up the server to only be a free tier?
It is worth trying if just to gain knowledge on AWS. But for hosting, I'd say DigitalOcean
https://aws.amazon.com/ebs/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/ebs/previous-generation/
Yes, you can incur charges if you exceed what's covered by the free tier. Not all AWS services even have a free tier, and those that do are severely limited (1 micro instance, 5GB of S3 storage, etc). You're not off in some sandboxed environment where they just shut you down if you go over the limits. It's more like a monthly credit of $X for the first 12 months of your account. To cover my ass, I set a really low billing alert threshold. Like "email me if my monthly bill ever projects to exceed $1".
I had a personal $400 learning experience with Amazon. They did refund it. My last company had a low-5-figure surprise a few years ago. Some of that could be considered their fault (alerts were sent to someone on vacation), but again, the refusal to allow the option of a "hit a limit, pull the plug" option is what causes this.
Personally this is the main reason why I have never considered using AWS for my small projects, but maybe this is an intentional choice by Amazon, to keep away "hobbyists" and only go after companies where an extra $1k in AWS bills this month is just a blip on the radar...
It's not unlimited liability, most of their services have limits imposed. If you've scaled any service to thousands of machines you'll quickly find out that they stop you at 20-30 machines or so. Then you have to contact support to get the limit increased.
Sure you can still rake up an unpleasant bill. But there are limits :)
And I've done work for clients that have requested really big increases because of both realistic and unrealistic expectations of handling traffic peaks. E.g. one client asked for an increase to 100 instances of 2-3 different types in a few regions to be prepared to handle a couple of days of high traffic. If said event had happened, they scaled it all up, and somehow didn't take them down again, it'd only take a few days of charges for them to be insolvent at their then-current funding level.
So you're right, there are limits, but limits or not doesn't matter if it's high enough that it can make you go out of business.
Which makes me wonder if anyone has ever gone out of business because AWS was unwilling to forgive a "surprise" bill. I'd be inclined to assume that they're willing to stretch quite far to avoid that, given that they seem to be very good about it. But I'd also not want to stake my business on hoping Amazon will be charitable about something like that.
[0] https://cloud.google.com/appengine/pricing#spending_limit
> Important: Spending limits are not supported in the App Engine flexible environment
> You may still be charged for usage of other Google Cloud Platform resources beyond the spending limit.
Did you set a billing alert? Google BigQuery has proactive "cost controls" that won't let you go overboard, whereas billing alerts are just that - alerts.
I agree with your larger point, but you're going to be surprised by a $500 bill, not a $500,000 bill.
It would be great if when entering your CC information, they let you set a default monthly cap for all your projects, to be overridden at the project level if you suddenly need to spend more.
Tested out the free tier of Amazon, but didn't realize spinning down and spinning up would ding me if they were within an hour.
Even know, when I use it for testing and I'm being fairly careful, I'll get a $3 bill at the end of the month. I was trying to set up alerts, but their alerts and dashboard, while I'm sure super capable, is a bit overwhelming as a new user.
Not a bug, this has been amazon's philosophy with accounts on all systems from very early on. Some of the initial designers of amazon knew families where multiple people shared one e-mail address, but wanted separate accounts for shopping.
Multiple accounts per e-mail address was a concious design decision for all Amazon systems.
There was no way at the time for me to a) see that I had a second account associated with my email address or b) reset the password for the second account without going through support c) merging the two accounts into one even with supports help.
It's why all of my projects sit on DO and I only really use Route 53 from AWS.
Then I get the next months invoice and it's not using my pre-paid services but instead is billing for full CPU usage - no reserved instances.
After emailing support several times they say it's my own fault for not using the correct instance type, even though it's identical to the one I pre-paid for. It may well be my error but it was caused by them since I never asked for my servers to be moved. It's been an expensive and time-wasting experience -- will never use them again.
Am currently evaluating GKE (even more expensive) and DigitalOcean.
Some types of data transfer in excess of data transfer included in your plan is subject to overage charges. Please see the FAQ for details.
So in theory (I haven't checked what the API gives you control over - so this may be worthless), you could monitor your instance (bandwidth, time up, disk usage, etc), and if things get out of hand, or approach your limit (whatever it is), you could use the API to say shut down or delete the instance, or throttle the bandwidth (maybe via firewall rules or something?).
Again - this would assume the API allows you to do this (and ideally from within the instance itself - which shouldn't be an issue, I wouldn't think). And again, it shouldn't take this much work (you're right, it should just be a simple control panel setting).
But maybe it's an option for those who have the skills to implement it?
I just took a quick look at the API docs - and while it doesn't look like you can mess with the firewall rules settings, everything else should be possible (get metric data, start/stop/reboot/delete instance, etc).
That's probably where most of their profit comes from. That option was most likely squashed from the highest authority.
says Someone1234. Should we believe it?
Exactly! We have used AWS and DO a lot this past year. DO is great for smaller sites/api's and super easy to use. Their support is also outstanding.
AWS has tons of tools but many come at a cost. We are in the process of moving a couple of sites off of AWS and onto a LiquidWeb dedicated box. We will be paying much less and the LW dedicated server is more than enough for what we need.
AWS is great for spinning up and scaling instances quickly and comes with a ton of other tools. At the end of the day however it is not always the most cost effective or even best offering for most sites/apps.
Well yeah, that's how they pay for those tools -- they charge for them.
Wait what? That's getting ridiculous. Seven years ago they would have been on time, perhaps even considered early by some, but three years ago when looking for hosting providers I already laughed at the ones without v6 and moved on without a second thought. They weren't even the cheap ones.
Currently enjoying a €3/mo VPS at Pcextreme.nl with the same specs as the $5 Lightsail VPS. But with IPv6 of course.
Perhaps I've been spoiled with dual stack at home since 2009 from xs4all. Other Dutch ISPs promised it in (iirc) 2013 and every year since, but there has yet to be a second big one to offer it and other countries like Belgium surpassed us by now. Even Germany's Telekom is getting there.
- Setup a HTTPS endpoint on the server that listens for an SNS notification and performs an action (e.g. backup ephemeral data to S3 and shutdown). I wrote the service in Go and the action is just a shell script but choose your favorite language.
- Setup an SNS subscription pointing to the service endpoint.
- Setup an SNS topic for the message.
- Set up an SNS notification in AWS billing. I use "When actual costs are equal to 100% of budgeted amount".
The problem is that it's necessary to lock down the endpoint listener as it will usually need root access in order to shutdown the machine. This can be done by using authentication on the endpoint, setting up a locked down user to run the service under and granting that user the ability to run /sbin/shutdown in the sudoers file.
There are probably nicer ways to do it, but this does work to limit my spend on each instance.
You can also add AWS API calls to delete any other costly related resources (static IPs, load balancers etc.)
I've been thinking about writing a more modular and robust app that handles multiple instances etc but most of my servers are now in GCE so I don't really have the need.
Of course all things are not equal (i.e. CPUs, SSDs, bandwidth, etc).
Provider: RAM, CPU Cores, Storage, Transfer
----------
$5/mo
LightSail: 512MB, 1, 20GB SSD, 1TB
DO: 512MB, 1, 20GB SSD, 1TB
VULTR: 768MB, 1, 15GB SSD, 1TB
----------
$10/mo
LightSail: 1GB, 1, 30GB SSD, 2TB
DO: 1GB, 1, 30GB SSD, 2TB
VULTR: 1GB, 1, 20GB SSD, 2TB
Linode: 2GB, 1, 24GB SSD, 2TB
----------
$20/mo
LightSail: 2GB, 1, 40GB SSD, 3TB
DO: 2GB, 2, 40GB SSD, 3TB
VULTR: 2GB, 2, 45GB SSD, 3TB
Linode: 4GB, 2, 48GB SSD, 3TB
----------
$40/mo
LightSail: 4GB, 2, 60GB SSD, 4TB
DO: 4GB, 2, 60GB SSD, 4TB
VULTR: 4GB, 4, 45GB SSD, 4TB
Linode: 8GB, 4, 96GB SSD, 4TB
----------
$80/mo
LightSail: 8GB, 2, 80GB SSD, 5TB
DO: 8GB, 4, 80GB SSD, 5TB
VULTR: 8GB, 6, 150GB SSD, 5TB
Linode: 12GB, 6, 192GB SSD, 8TB
EDIT: Anyone cares to explain his reasons behind a downvote?
Your post reminds me of the burden of proof fallacy, in which you create work for other people by asking questions you could easily answer yourself.
If you or anybody posts the comparison you requested, it will surely be upvoted.
They're also typically leased for at least a full month and can't be spun up/down on demand like you can with these services.
Plus they focus on large (>16GB) dedicated servers.
It's a small business run by a few people (though it's been around for 10 years, so a pretty stable one), which has the pros and cons that go along with that. The tech staff is good, techies who know what they're doing and generally assume that you do also. So if you send a request or problem report, you aren't going to get a form reply that asks if you tried turning it off and back on again. But it's just a handful of people, so if there's a major issue, fixing things is pretty manual and slower than at places that have armies of 24/7 devops staff.
One specific thing I really like about it: it gives you SSH access to a proper text console, in case you want to install a custom OS, recover a broken install, etc. Most VPS providers give you console access, but most do it via VNC in the browser, which is not my favorite way to do sysadmin work.
Do they let you do that? They don't say that in the purchases page.
Also, how is uptime relative to vultr?
I haven't used vultr so can't comment on that.
You can install a custom OS. But it can be difficult to use an installer we don't provide right now because we only allow serial console access, not VNC. This means most installers won't work out of the box. Worst case you can dd an image to the disk using ssh from the rescue image.
FYI we don't do overage charges right now. For network, if we can't throttle your traffic down then we will shut your service off.
Our blog is a little misleading these days in that for downtime for individual servers, we started emailing customers directly rather than posting to the blog. This is because we want to make sure customers see the downtime notice. We also got confused responses sometimes to the blog wondering whether a given service was affected or not and if we email directly there is no such confusion.
I think our worst case downtime barring about 5 services this year has been the following:
* 0.75 hour network outage, unplanned - 2016-03-16 (gave proportional credit)
* ~2.5 unplanned downtime due to hardware failure requiring new components - 2016-04-03 (gave 15% month credit)
* 2.6 hours downtime from start of maintenance window, planned due to security upgrade - 2016-07-23 (gave proportional credit)
* 2 hours or less downtime, planned due to security upgrade - sometime around 2016-09-01 (gave proportional credit)
* 1.5 hour network outage, unplanned - 2016-09-09 (gave proportional credit)
* 1.3 hour network outage, unplanned - 2016-11-06 (gave proportional credit)
* 2.04 hours downtime from start of maintenance window, planned due to security upgrade - 2016-11-18 (gave proportional credit)
This is a total of up to 12.69 hours downtime over the year so far, assuming downtime started at the beginning of maintenance windows (it usually started after.) Of that 6.05 hours, or less than half, was unplanned.
So far this year there's been about 336 days or 8064 hours. 12.69/8064 is 99.84% uptime overall, which is significantly lower than we would like. For some servers the uptime has so far been significantly better in that there were no hardware failures, one of the security upgrades was unnecessary, and the turnaround time for the remainder of the security upgrades was much faster than for this particular server.
For this particular server, the largest downtime contributors were security upgrades and network outages in that order. For network downtime, we got around to setting up our second upstream but there's a number of single points of failure we should take care of in 2017. There is also some additional scripting we should probably do that would cut down on the network downtime a lot, such as automatically taking down BGP if connectivity beyond the first hop is lost.
For the security update downtime, I think our most realistic bet right now is to get ourselves on the latest version of Xen once it comes out. That will hopefully have a stable implementation (not a technology preview) for live patching.
NodeServ: $1.25/month = 50GB HDD, 512MB RAM, 1 core, 1TB bandwidth, location in Jacksonville.
Host.us: $6/month = 150GB HDD, 6GB RAM, 4 cores, 5.12TB bandwidth, location in Dallas.
Both deals found on LowEndBox.
That's not to say getting a 8GB openVZ vps for $4 a month isn't an amazing deal, but just that there are caveats.
For the most part it's reasonable, but there's a freaking litany of reasonable things you're not allowed to run, including IRC, audio/video streaming, game servers, and so on.
Why on earth do you sell me X block of resources for Y$/month if you're going to tell me what I can and can't do with them? Surely unreasonable use would be covered by resource limits already in place?
* they oversell, so they assume that only small fraction of web servers will consume 100% of resources, while almost every torrent client will consume 100% of the bandwidth. There is nothing wrong with overselling hosting within a reasonable margin, but most of the people here want to run more than a LAMP stack on the server. * they get too much admin overhead replying to Tor "abuse" letters etc., so they just decided to deal with it in the simplest way possible.
I guess both factors contribute equally.
I doubt CPU or RAM allocation is the issue here given AWS already have a good CPU time credit system to manage it.
I have a bunch of sites running on it without stepping on each other, and I doubt that would be the case on AWS / Google / DO.
If I need an SSD, there are options too, though DigitalOcean is indeed one of the best if you need a cheap US-based server. If the location doesn't matter, EU, Russia, Ukraine have some great deals.
Example: $4.6/month = 40GB SSD, 1GB RAM, 3 cores, unlimited traffic @200Mbps.
Price breakdown vs DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode, OVH, and Online.net / Scaleway:
$5/mo
| Provider | RAM | Cores | Storage | Transfer |
| ---------------------- | ----- | ----- | ---------- | -------- |
| LightSail | 512MB | 1 | 20GB SSD | 1TB |
| DO | 512MB | 1 | 20GB SSD | 1TB |
| VULTR | 768MB | 1 | 15GB SSD | 1TB |
| Hetzner (virtual) | 1GB | 1 | 25GB SSD | 2TB |
| OVH | 2GB | 1 | 10GB SSD | ∞TB |
| Scaleway (virtual) | 2GB | 2 | 50GB SSD | ∞TB |
| Provider | RAM | Cores | Storage | Transfer |
| ---------------------- | ----- | ----- | ---------- | -------- |
| LightSail | 1GB | 1 | 30GB SSD | 2TB |
| DO | 1GB | 1 | 30GB SSD | 2TB |
| VULTR | 1GB | 1 | 20GB SSD | 2TB |
| Linode | 2GB | 1 | 24GB SSD | 2TB |
| Hetzner (virtual) | 2GB | 2 | 50GB SSD | 5TB |
| OVH | 4GB | 1 | 20GB SSD | ∞TB |
| Scaleway (virtual) | 8GB | 8 | 200GB SSD | ∞TB |
| Online.net (dedicated) | 4GB | 2 | 120GB SSD | ∞TB |
| Provider | RAM | Cores | Storage | Transfer |
| ---------------------- | ----- | ----- | ---------- | -------- |
| LightSail | 2GB | 1 | 40GB SSD | 3TB |
| DO | 2GB | 2 | 40GB SSD | 3TB |
| VULTR | 2GB | 2 | 45GB SSD | 3TB |
| Linode | 4GB | 2 | 48GB SSD | 3TB |
| Hetzner (virtual) | 4GB | 2 | 100GB SSD | 8TB |
| OVH | 8GB | 2 | 40GB SSD | ∞TB |
| Scaleway (dedicated) | 16GB | 8 | 50GB SSD | ∞TB |
| Online.net (dedicated) | 16GB | 8 | 250GB SSD | ∞TB |
| Provider | RAM | Cores | Storage | Transfer |
| ---------------------- | ----- | ----- | ---------- | -------- |
| LightSail | 4GB | 2 | 60GB SSD | 4TB |
| DO | 4GB | 2 | 60GB SSD | 4TB |
| VULTR | 4GB | 4 | 45GB SSD | 4TB |
| Linode | 8GB | 4 | 96GB SSD | 4TB |
| Hetzner (virtual) | 16GB | 4 | 400GB SSD | 20TB |
| OVH | 8GB | 2 | 40GB SSD | ∞TB |
| Scaleway (dedicated) | 32GB | 8 | 50GB SSD | ∞TB |
| Online.net (dedicated) | 32GB | 8 | 750GB SSD | ∞TB |
| Provider | RAM | Cores | Storage | Transfer |
| ---------------------- | ----- | ----- | ---------- | -------- |
| LightSail | 8GB | 2 | 80GB SSD | 5TB |
| DO | 8GB | 4 | 80GB SSD | 5TB |
| VULTR | 8GB | 6 | 150GB SSD | 5TB |
| Linode | 12GB | 6 | 192GB SSD | 8TB |
| Hetzner (virtual) | 32GB | 8 | 600GB SSD | 30TB |
| Hetzner (dedicated) | 64GB | 8 | 1024GB SSD | 30TB |
| OVH | 8GB | 2 | 40GB SSD | ∞TB |
| Scaleway (dedicated) | 32GB | 8 | 50GB SSD | ∞TB |
| Online.net (dedicated) | 64GB | 8 | 1500GB SSD | ∞TB |
There also have no setup cost for these dedicated servers.
But Amazon will lower your CPU quota as well, if you use it for too long, so it’s not like the numbers of Amazon themselves even really mean anything.
The same story with storage performance – Amazon’s is horrible, but it’s network-attached.
I downvoted you because you talked about your downvotes.
Don't interrupt the discussion to meta-discuss the scoring system.
Write your post and live with the results.
1. Mission-critical/Production ready reliability and communication (all maintenance and issues)
2. No unexpected termination of instances / Reasonable warning & mediation
3. Not overprovisioned / little concern of noisy neighbors
4. Tier 3/4 redundancies
5. Strong American coverage (each DC with Tier 3/4 level services)
6. No setup fee on new instances
7. 1-minute provisioning (simple creation of instances / no ticket needed for deleting resource)
8. Programmatic IaaS management including provisioning, DNS, and images
9. Quality resources - mostly Xeons not ARMs, local SSD not Ceph
10. Huge backing - they're not closing tomorrow & I wanted a #10
While OVH, Hetzner, Leaseweb seem like nice services, particularly for needs in Europe, I can't build an American-centric service on those, set it and forget it nearly as easily or worry-free as with DO/Linode/Vultr/Lightsail.
What if I need a lot of CPU power, but not much bandwidth? What if I want lots of RAM, but don't need much disk space? What if I'd rather have an HDD with more storage than a faster SSD? There's nobody offering a "configure your own VPS specs" plan.
----- Dear Vultr Customer,
Including pending charges, your account is carrying a $5.94 balance.
In order to cover your current balance and your estimated monthly costs, our billing system will automatically deposit $275.00 from your payment method on file in 24 hours.
Usually, when I receive an email like this, the amount is equal to the monthly bill of the instances I have active at the moment.
You are not being "charged" per se. The amount is transferred to your account and is there as credit until you spend it.
Sorry for nitpicking, but it is important point.
You are being _charged_
- This is a charge against your card
- They are not a bank, so the money in your "account" with them is just an unsecured, general liability to you. If they go bust, they owe you money but you will never see it.
- If you want to withdraw that money from your "account" and they refuse, then your options are pretty limited.
Once they take it from your payment method, it becomes their money, not yours. That's a charge.
Maybe a bug in their billing software or something...
That said, it is an odd message to send out, and I had my concerns when I first received a similar email. Maybe it's something they should look into altering.
I've never been charged on vultr, as I use bitcoin to always pay my bills (which is push only). I think they have stopped accepting that for new customers due to abuse though, which is quite a shame (but understandable).
Really, it just seems like AWS is fighting DO on this one, to get a share of their profits. My impression is they're looking for DO & AWS customers to stay on an Amazon-only stack. The comparison made by the commenter above actually makes me consider Vutlr and Linode :)
I'd be grateful if you used my link https://vpsdime.com/aff.php?aff=1272
I have no idea why people think Amazon pricing is worth it.
The docs appear to say you can add these to a VPC but I don't see how to do it.
They don't say the SSD storage is local, so I'm sure it's not.
A few runs with `fio` confirms this is EBS GP2 or slower:
The bench: "fio --name=randrw --ioengine=libaio --direct=1 --bs=4k --iodepth=64 --size=4G --rw=randrw --rwmixread=75 --gtod_reduce=1"
Lightsail $5:
read : io=3071.7MB, bw=9199.7KB/s, iops=2299, runt=341902msec
write: io=1024.4MB, bw=3067.1KB/s, iops=766, runt=341902msec
read : io=3071.7MB, bw=242700KB/s, iops=60674, runt= 12960msec
write: io=1024.4MB, bw=80935KB/s, iops=20233, runt= 12960msec
These appear to just be t2.nano instances (CPU perf is good, E5-2676 v3 @ 2.40 GHz, http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench3/8164581).
For advanced users, there isn't much compelling here to make up for the administration overhead. It's a little cheaper than a similar-spec t2.nano (roughly $4.75 on-demand + $3 for a 30GB SSD). The real win is egress cost; you can transfer EC2->Lightsail for free. 1TB of egress would be nearly $90 on EC2, but is only $5 on Lightsail.
In other news, EC2 egress pricing is obviously ridiculous.
All competitors seem to outstrip AWS on this. Do they have some legacy infrastructure that is just too big too upgrade to something more modern, or is this "on purpose"?
Many competitors just use local storage, which comes with its own serious downsides for the company and customer. DigitalOcean just recently launched its Volumes service, but it's very limited compared to EBS, and not nearly as fast as its local SSDs.
EBS is generally fine but I would really enjoy the option to have ~40GB local SSDs for caching (but I suppose you can always grab an r3/r4 and cache in memory if that's your bag).
The best cloud I/O perf I've seen, bar none, comes from Joyent's Triton containers. Beats even DO by 3-4x. Beyond that you need to go bare-metal.
The downside is that the access methods for blocks mean some operations are more computationally and bandwidth intensive, meaning you will get fewer IOPS and less sustained throughput without paying more money. In addition, there is always going to be a bit more latency when going over the network versus a SAS RAID card.
As with all things in life, it's a tradeoff. If you look at other large providers' (GCE, DO at least) network storage offering, you'll also see a significant performance regression from local SSD.
So network-attached storage for Lightsail is upside for AWS, but all downside for the customer.
LOL => A 80GB EBS SSD snapshot takes more than 1 hour.
Subsequent snapshots are incremental and will be less slow.
> multi server/rack redundancy with EC
You can move drive manually after you stop an instance, if that's what you call redundancy.
> ability to scale up with provisioned IOPS
Nope. You need to unmount, clone the existing EBS volume to a new EBS volume with different specs, and mount the new volume. You can't change anything on the fly.
The last time we had to change a 1TB drive from a database, we tried it on a smaller volume... then we announced that it would be a 14-hours-of-downtime-maintenance-operations (if we do it this way) :D
Depends how much they've been written to since last snapshot. Heavy writes and it can be just as slow again.
Just have a bastion host with that and you'll have no trouble ssh -A'ing your way there and then on to the real box on whatever port it's on.
In total, I'm spending about $15,000/yr on AWS, and someone spending $5/mo gets their bandwidth 18x cheaper than me? Shouldn't it be the other way around, and I should be the one with the discount?
I get enough headaches dealing with reserved instances, and trying to buy them at the correct time of the year to line up with price drops. Now, I need to consider dumping my autoscaling groups, EC2 web servers, and moving them to LightSail? Why not just give us a fair price on bandwidth, instead of more complications?
And specifically for Linode, since all the servers draw from the same pool of resources, you can instead create a ton of $10 servers and grab bandwidth for $0.005/GB, which Linode is perfectly fine with (note that bandwidth is pro-rated, so you'd need to create those servers in the beginning of the month to take full advantage of it).
> Data transfer OUT from a Lightsail instance to another Lightsail instance or AWS resource is also free while the private IP address of the instance is used.
It could even be worth it to set Lightsail up as reverse proxy and profit off of very cheap(for AWS) traffic e.g. for S3. I can't really believe they would allow this. Am I missing something?
I think you would still be charged. I think it would just be better to upgrade.
At least a reverse proxy, maybe even some caching.
I don't know how dynamic or unique your pages are to each user or if they're largely ubiquitous across all users.
Assuming the latter I know that you can cache a base page in some CDN's through a different header. Akamai's DSA product in particular allows you to cache HTML using the Edge-Control header that has matching syntax to Cache-Control. Edge-Control is stripped out in transit, the client never sees it. This allows you to control cache TTL in Akamai's edge servers independently of the client side cache.
A quick look through Amazon Cloudfront docs seems to indicate that Cloudfront cache's will respect the Cache-Control header but this can get complicated if you don't want the same TTL within client side browser cache. Perhaps I missed something, though?
Even if your page is dynamic but you're willing to go a route like Angular or ReactJS polymorphic client side apps you can still offload a bunch of those basepage requests assuming your app is suitable for this kind of design pattern. The assumption is that you will be relying on API's so additional complicated caching calculations may apply ;)
Depending on how you construct your cache key you can do a certain amount of multi-variate caching and still achieve pleasant cache hit rates. This applies to both base pages and fronting API's with a CDN.
Regardless it looks like for only U.S. traffic (as a yardstick) Cloudfront charges 0.085 per GB so futzing with the AWS calculator I split a page I'm very familiar with (49KB) across your 3TB for US only traffic and the price comes to $304.68. No savings.
Looking around I see that Fastly (a lower priced than Akamai - Varnish based CDN) charges a $0.12 rate, the price there in the same scenario would be something like $400 (the number of http requests made factor into some of these pricing models.) Akamai comes in at $500.
OTOH a CDN I've never used (Stackpath) might cost only $140 which would get you close to half your current spend. Remember that depending on your cache hit/miss ration and how many cache flushes (cache object invalidation) that price could be anywhere from slightly to extremely optimistic as you still have to pay for the requests between your CDN edge servers and your AWS origin.
To be fair, when considering pricing Akamai is the big fish here and has something on the order of 170,000 edge servers sprinkled all over the world whereas some of these smaller CDN's have far far fewer.
Once you're into some CDN's there's all sorts of wonky things you can do with parent-child tiering models that can be leveraged to further limit the number of times a call is made back to your origin (aws) server.
Here's a pretty good CDN pricing calculator: http://www.cdncalc.com/
I have bigger ears and a get a lot of discomfort from most headphones. I have a pair of Audio Technica ATH-A900X (with huge cans) at home, but I'm always hunting for a cheaper pair to carry around with me.
My ears are huge, they fit very well within these earpads. By comparison I use the Beyerdynamic DT770 as my music headphones (vs travel) as those are the only ones I've tried so far that fit my ears and are super comfortable.
> Because shortly after he gets into Port Sherman, the wheels on his motorcycle lock up - the spokes become rigid - and the ride gets very bumpy. A couple of seconds after that, the entire bike goes dead, becomes an inert chunk of metal. Not even the engine works. He looks down into the flat screen on top of the fuel tank, wanting to get a status report, but it's just showing snow. The bios has crashed. Asherah's possessed his bike.
DO is not great in this regard as their butcher their allocations, but Vultr gives each VPS a proper /64. Scaleway has partial IPv6 support (not for their bare metal could, but their VPS's do support it).
I urge you to vote with your wallets, unless you really like paying $1/month or more per IP for the foreseeable future.
what do you mean?
2core/2GB/50GB is a better offering than DigitalOcean's. Sadly, it seems like they still don't have FreeBSD.
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-ipv6-support-for-ec2-in...
All have 3TB transfer
Linode(Best): 4GB RAM, 2 Core, 48 GB SSD
DO: 2GB RAM, 2 Core, 40 GB SSD
LightSail(Worst): 2GB RAM, 1 Core, 40 GB SSD
I use this exact instance on Linode for my site https://dictanote.co; that one extra core makes a lot of difference when you want to take a backup of db or something intensive like that.
T2 instances work on a credit system, where you are allocated X credits per minute. If you use less than you're allocated, you will rack up hours of CPU time (there is some cap). You can see the credits in the AWS dashboard.
Problem is, that buffer you have is also the delay between when you start doing too much work and when you find out you're doing too much work because the instance isn't responding. And it's the delay between when you fix the problem and your balance goes back to "normal".
I recently hosted my personal tree of Fast-Growing-Programming-Language on a T2, and "accidentally" became the #1 google search result for the entire long-tail of every stack trace and every error message. Took me awhile to piece together what was wrong.
https://buyvm.net/kvm-dedicated-server-slices
(No affiliation, happy customer with minimal downtime for ~5 years now.)
3,1,2 - P.O. Boxes and non-residential or mail forwarding addresses are not accepted.
3,3,1 - Clients may not open multiple personal accounts under any circumstance.
3,3,2 - Clients may not give other persons access to their accounts.
I wouldn't host an ethereum or bitcoin node on Linode. If I were a PCI auditor I would think pretty hard about compliance on the platform.
That said, blog you don't care too much about -- sure!
It was less than a year ago - 11 months. December in to January, Linode data centers, but especially Atlanta, were heavily attacked.
https://blog.linode.com/2016/01/29/christmas-ddos-retrospect...
There was another moderate attack a few months ago.
Caused no end of headache for some clients of mine.
I like Linode, and have used them for some projects in the past, but there are more options now.
Then the ddoss and offline hosts. it's basically just amateur hour over there.
That we know of. For better or worse, we're relying on these companies being transparent about account security issues and compromises.
Perhaps it's just me, but I doubt we are being kept in the loop, especially over something which has such a major impact on customer confidence (as evidenced by the sibling comment & replies).
Ow.
Lightsail should be a entry-level product to upsell more AWS stuff.
- What kind of SSD?
- What kind of "core"?
- How much are you over-provisioned on the physical hardware?
vCPUs are even worse. Buy a 20-core Xeon box, split it across 60 tenants, each with 2 vCPUs each, or via 40 tenants with 1 vCPU?
t2 instances notoriously throttle way down to 10% if your workload is too consistent. The full performance is quite good from the 2.40 GHz E2676 v3, but at 10% it's worse than a Raspberry Pi. And this will always hit you at the worst time (when under load).
As for the SSDs, they're just GP2 storage, which is an order of magnitude slower than DO and nearly 2 orders of magnitude slower than Joyent Triton.
So AWS is providing a seriously inferior product here, but it's under the AWS umbrella and peers with the rest of their services. The question is: will the target market care about any of AWS's other services enough to make the inferior $/perf worthwhile, and will they integrate easily enough for the average developer to use them?
Same thing with OVH, you can get a powerful dedicated server with unlimited bandwidth for the price of a medium EC2 instance. I hope they will open their datacenter in California soon.
I have their 3 euro arm server and have no problem pushing more than a 100 megabit a second from it.
Edit: 3 things, it's also shared among a lot of users that don't use what they can. For everyone using 100mbps there's probably 20 who use less then 1mbps.
They will offer you better peering if you pay extra, but even then you're paying much less than at AWS for high traffic.
I suspect that AWS makes most profit with bandwidth while other services run with a very low margin.
Keep in mind that in France, very few people know that Amazon is more than a website selling books and random stuff. But in the US, very few people know about OVH and Scaleway.
The major reason to use a VPS host instead of AWS is that AWS is complicated. This seems to be just as simple as DO or a million other VPS hosts, with the added benefit that it's easy to hook up to Amazon's other services if you need to.
The major reason to use a VPS host instead of AWS is the order of magnitude price difference. That’s not going away with LightSail either.
Look at all the French/German/Dutch hosters, they’re 10-20 times cheaper than AWS, and you get far better storage performance and cheaper traffic.
Which means it's free since transfering data from one VPC to another one or peering is free (at least it was with bare aws)
Beyond the free data transfer IN and between instances, every single Lightsail plan also includes a healthy amount of free data transfer OUT. For example, using the cheapest Lightsail bundle you can send up to 1 TB of data to the Internet within the month, at no extra charge. Your data transfer allowance resets every month, and you can consume it whenever you need within the month.
If you delete your instance early and create another one, the free data transfer allowance is shared between the two instances. Data transfer overages above the free allowance are charged at $0.09/GB. "
I assumed that each light sail instance would get the 1 TB bandwidth. But, the FAQ seem to suggest that each plan gets 1 TB. I can't tell if I can provision one VM of each plan and proxy bandwidth through. Say for $5 + $10 VM costs, I get 1 TB + 2 TB bandwidths..
So essentially you're getting $90 worth of egress traffic for $5. It's even more obvious now that EC2 egress pricing is ridiculous.
What I love about VPSes as opposed to AWS, Azure, or Google is that you get a completely a la carte box with a direct interface right to the Internet and both IPv4 and an IPv6 /64. You can instantly provision "servers" that you can do anything you want with -- you can treat them like "pets" to run a personal blog or a legacy app, or you can herd them like "cattle" with your favorite management and provisioning tools. The pricing is great and the infrastructure is mix and match.
Many VPS providers (Vultr and I think DO as well) will even let you upload and install an ISO directly onto the KVM instance over the web. That means you can install OpenBSD or even weird OSes. I've heard of people putting wacky stuff like OS/2 in the cloud this way. Some even allow nested virtualization.
A VPS is ideal for a large number of common work loads, but not all. For things where I want to make extensive use of AWS's managed services or where I want to have something more akin to a private data center, EC2 and similar offerings from Microsoft and Google are great. But for those I want the whole enchilada. If I'm going there I want everything the EC2 management console and API gives me including full-blown VPC, etc.
This seems to occupy an uncanny valley. Without IPv6, direct networking, etc. it's a crummy VPS, but it's not as rich as EC2. The only pluses I see are direct access to AWS services (but if I want that I probably want EC2) and AWS's security and uptime "guarantees."
Problem with the latter is that it's largely marketing. I've routinely clocked 300-day-plus uptimes on Digital Ocean and I've also had EC2 instances mysterious die or go into a coma. They might have something to say on security, but I've never seen any real proof that AWS security is intrinsically superior to their competition. Neither DO nor Vultr has had a recent major breach AFIAK and they all seem to use the same virtualization tech.
If you're familiar with AWS then you can get a similar offering directly, particularly using reserved instance pricing.
It's nicely packaged their existing products (EC2, VPC, ...). So you can get Digital Ocean like experience on AWS. You can still tune the underlying services.
The thing that keeps me away from AWS services is the depth of the service - I need to be an expert in AWS on top of knowing how to configure my servers, which for now is maybe a non starter.
It does show you the power of packaging: with a simple domain and thrown together marketing page, you too can target another market segment.
This is an intriguing move and one that I'm sure DigitalOcean, Linode, and Vultr have been fearing may happen.
The pricing is on par with these alternatives in the VPS space.
Linode offers the double of the RAM for the same price for $10, $20 and $40 VPSs.
It'd be nice if they bumped the $20 plan to 3GB RAM (or go full Linode at 4GB)
$20
4GB RAM
2 CPUs
$40
8GB RAM
4 CPUs
[1] https://amazonlightsail.com/images/hero/index-6316203d.jpg
Linode and OVH, while not as prestigious as AWS and DO, offer much more fair pricing when you need more resources.
But, as others note, the variable cost factor seems to still be a sticking point. I can setup a Digital Ocean droplet, or Linode, or one of a dozen other low-cost VPS providers, for $5 or $10 a month, and I know it will never cost more than that. Maybe I'll bump into memory, disk, or bandwidth limits...but, AWS is a killer if you aren't careful. I used to maintain (and pay for, out of pocket) a non-profit's website on AWS, and the price ballooned while I wasn't paying attention, due to automated backups to S3 and some other stuff, and by the time I noticed was costing me $183/month, for a website that could easily run on a cheap VPS. My fault for not paying closer attention, not setting up cost alerts, etc., but I moved the site off of AWS and onto one of my own web servers, where it literally costs me single digit dollars to run (it has many GBs of email but otherwise is a small site with very low traffic).
So...unless they're giving me some reason to think I won't end up with a massive bill one month because of a popular post, or something, I probably still won't think "I know, I'll use AWS!", unless it's a situation where I need the scaling capabilities of AWS.
Then I used digitalocean because of the free 1 year server time github gave me and everything was a breeze. They had tutorials for a lot of stuff, like how pubkeys and privatekeys worked, how to use ssh, how a server works, how to use nginx/apache, and even node.js stuff. I got up and running quickly even though it was my first time using a VPS. It was super easy, and the best part was with my knowledge gained from DigitalOcean, I was able to start using AWS with relative ease.
I think Lightsail is a good competitor to DigitalOcean, good for newbies who can't exactly figure out how much their server will use and charge them. But imo, with the same stats and stuff as DigitalOcean as a newbie I'd stick with DigitalOcean just because of how helpful their tutorials are in general and how helpful their interface is.
~ speedtest-cli
Retrieving speedtest.net configuration...
Testing from DigitalOcean (192.241.229.48)...
Retrieving speedtest.net server list...
Selecting best server based on ping...
Hosted by Monkey Brains (San Francisco, CA) [5.93 km]: 2.132 ms
Testing download
Download: 921.09 Mbit/s
Testing upload
Upload: 705.31 Mbit/s
Network speed should generally not be the issue with AWS, it's disk iops where the non-local SSDs will make a major impact.
In terms of network speed not being important, that's not true. Lots of workloads are network bound not i/o bound (load balancers, web servers, etc).
Unlike VMs, which statically allocate mem whether you use it or not, containers have the chance to grow and reduce mem as workfloads go up and down, which means you could pay for GB/h of mem usage on the right-sized # of vCPU base.
Not sure if any IaaS/PaaS is doing this.
Joyent pricing[1] is still for static resource allocation and not cheap compared to these larger players.
[0] https://www.joyent.com/triton [1] https://www.joyent.com/pricing
https://gist.github.com/xfalcox/3b99beac4935fd154a4cbeb540dc...
CPU model: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2673 v3 @ 2.40GHz
Number of cores: 1
CPU frequency: 2394.441 MHz
Total amount of RAM: 3439 MB
Total amount of swap: MB
System uptime: 6 days, 15:49,
I/O speed: 20.1 MB/s
Bzip 25MB: 4.27s
Download 100MB file: 6.15MB/sRandom thoughts from shameless noob:
- I like Digital Ocean's OS/app images for speed / smaller projects. Looks like Lightsail offers this with Bitnami. Not sure how complicated that is in their console.
- Amazon IAM comes with a bit too much overhead for noobies like myself. Glad this doesn't require you to set that up when you just want a quick and dirty VPS.
- Bah. Resizing/upgrading requires you to do it through API currently. That kind of sucks.
- Nice! 30 day free trial.
Lightsail 2: $10/mo 1 GB memory, 1 core, 30 GB SSD, bandwidth cap -- Scaleway: $10/mo 8 GB memory, 6 cores, 200 GB SSD, unmetered bandwidth.
OVH virtual servers have also always been cheaper than Lightsail, and bandwidth is of course unmetered: https://www.ovh.com/us/vps/vps-ssd.xml
Now if they could just get to the point where $5 gets you a running Docker container running on the equivalent of the Lightsail VPS (without setting up the backing EC2 infrastructure like ECS), I suspect that's closer to the platform that many users really want to have ...
I don't have huge hopes for their business going forward.
I also wouldn't be too surprised to see some people using these as middle-man boxes to reduce transfer costs associated with EC2 - $5 for 1TB is darned cheap for AWS. Using one of these to back up data from some EC2 hosts would be a win.
Doesn't expose the full, intimidating complexity of the AWS management console and workflow.
- no regions outside U.S. - no floating IPs - no Debian images
DO appears to have a considerably better offering.
Does anyone have experience with how "clean" the AWS IP addresses are? I'd hate to switch to Lightsail and have to deal with deliverability and spam blacklist issues. I've been fortunate to have had zero issues on Linode.
That said, you have to ask them to remove their port 25 throttle and set rDNS: https://aws.amazon.com/forms/ec2-email-limit-rdns-request
The only real gripe that I have is that they don't statically route the /64 they assign to your VPS so I have to run a ndp proxy daemon.
The control panels in Vultr seem like 3rd party reseller ones akin to the cPanel/WHM days. I was not able to upgrade my Vultr VPS to a larger one with a few clicks like I expected to be able to (and am able to on DO and Linode). I guess you are expected to put in a support ticket or something. It felt very much like a basic Xen setup, though they have made recent strides to help with that.
With DigitalOcean, I can upgrade my VPS with a few clicks, and even downgrade them as well if the storage disk is not expanded when you upgrade. I am very impressed with their offerings, and the ease of use of their control panel setup.
Otherwise they are very similar to DO but with more data centres. The only complaint otherwise is their instances start a little slower. The API is very easy to use though.
(for anyone curious, it's ~50 servers across 8 different data centers, roughly equally distributed)
It used to be Linode had the better of everything comparing to DO. Faster CPU even if they are same core count. SSD had much faster IOPS. Less oversold therefore bandwidth were good. And there is no point giving you 100TB transfer per month if you are limited to 10Mbps port speed. Linode ran on shared 40Gbps Port and peak bandwidth were great ( for its price ). Then there is the quality of the Network, ping time between different ISP and Exchanges. Linode has consistently been better then DO. And not it offer double the memory.
But many are worried about Linode's security issues and therefore would not even touch them with a ten foot pole.
I have yet to see quality VPS that offer a whole package better then Linode. Vultr, OVH, Online.net and Scaleway included.
I am hoping Lightsail bring some competition here.
Lightsail looks excellent since the setup is just a gazillion times more user friendly than the standard EC2. A single page affair, a launch script, authentication, it's all there. Once launched, I get all the info and metrics I need.
I kinda wish they streamlined their usual console to this level, but this way it's fine as well. I don't tend to use S3 and EC2 as much as I'd like given its non-existent UX, but this gives me hope that Amazon is taking user experience seriously.
Sure, it may be underpowered compared to DO or Linode, but having all services under one roof is worth it to me. I'm happy.
* First, this is great. The simplified interface vs EC2 is terrific. This is the direction EC2 (and RDS and S3 and basically everything) needs to be going.
* Instances you start in LightSail don't show up in your EC2 console. I would expect there to be some kind of data sharing there.
* Similarly, creating a "static IP address" doesn't show up in your elastic IP list. I'm not sure if this is intentional, but to manage two different views of products that you're billing me for is... troublesome.
* Last, if I could migrate elastic IPs from EC2 to LightSail I'd be migrating all of my instances immediately. The bandwidth savings are massive. (Related: when is the 2TB limit for a t2.small going to be migrated over to EC2?)
I don't understand why everybody on this thread is complaining about overages? If you use more than the allocated amount you pay overages, simple idea. Why in the world, would you want your server to just shut down when you reach a limit?
The in-browser SSH also deals with the problem of students who are on Windows machine. You haven't hated PuTTY until you've tried walking a student through it on their Surface Pro.
+ You can use private networking for cross-instance communication.
+ You can even communicate with other AWS services by using VPC peering.
+ Hourly billing.
- The firewall rules are not shared. You can't create a single rule and attach to multiple instances.
? What are the network throughput caps? Can't find it anywhere?
? Are the disk physical or using EBS?
? Can you snapshot a running instance, or does it have to stopped?The main advantage of Amazon LightSail over DigitalOcean are: built-in firewall (instead of messing with iptables), managed database with AWS RDS, and using S3 with a low latency and no networking cost.
It can be a very powerful model if done well, or done poorly cost a lot for less performance.
I use Hetzner myself for my large projects but the machines were configured using the same scripts I practiced over and over again on DO.
1). support more linux distros (hint: Debian)
2). let you place instances in other AWS regions
3). let you pool bandwidth quotas across instances
4). improve the cpu/memory competitiveness of their $20+ plans
Also, don't like the firewall being configured via the dashboard (reminds me of the same crappy approach used by scaleway). Alarming too that their SSH console auto logs you in (even if you started an instance with your own public key rather than Amazon's).
Is there a service, that you know of, that would simplify AWS so that we can just use it with predictable expenses and ability to grow? Maybe I am asking for too much.
Imagine if you could easily spin up DB instances and create LBs within LightSail - they would offer more features than DigitalOcean (or any other "VPS Provider"), while being price and usability competitive.
I would definitely be nervous if I was DigitalOcean - there are still advantages (support, tutorials, etc), but this closed the gap significantly.
t2.nano = $5
t2.micro = $10
t2.small = $20
t2.medium = $40
t2.large = $80LightSail's default firewall opens ports 22 (SSH) and 80 (HTTP) but has 443 (HTTPS) closed. That seems like a terrible default for making a developer-friendly service. Hopefully they fix that and open 443 by default. Otherwise, a lot of wasted time is going to be spent by developers who have configured SSL on their sites and don't know why it isn't working.
LightSail feels very similar to DreamCompute that DreamHost launched, including the approach of only allowing SSH public key auth without any option of using password auth. So, they're intentionally leaving out some users with that approach.
For this I prefer https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/
DO and LightSail are close (if not) exactly the same spec wise?
All that's I've read so far essentially states that.
99.95% SLA means the following amount of downtime: Daily: 43.2s Weekly: 5m 2.4s Monthly: 21m 54.9s Yearly: 4h 22m 58.5s
granted with AWS you probably get access to other AWS products so there's that...
I guess I google virtual private servers
$5/mo per 1TB of bandwidth = $5.00 / 1024 = $0.0049/GB compared to EC2's normal $0.09/GB -- That's a 91-95% discount on egress data!
https://lightsail.aws.amazon.com/ls/docs/overview/article/us...
Of course, after your initial allotment of cheap bandwidth, LightSail switches to the regular AWS egress prices.
"You can currently create up to 20 Lightsail instances, 5 static IPs, and 3 DNS domain zones in a Lightsail account."
So obviously there's a hard cap within one account. The $80 account comes with 5tb, so one would have to be burning a bit of bandwidth - 100tb - to cap it out. Frankly though, at $1600, Amazon is still printing a massive profit margin on that 100tb of transfer.
These seem like they'd be good front-end servers hooked up to RDS etc.
I feel as excited as I was for Azure's Build 2016. Now I'm feeling pulled to AWS. This is great for AWS, not so much for Google Cloud which further fades into obscurity in my mind. I'd love to see that change, more competition in the cloud space = more options for us developers = more conditions in our favour.
Amazon LightSail just killed digitalocean for me which has been steadily getting more expensive (for instance I can't downsize to a less expensive plan once I resize my image, meaning I forked out $100/month for something that would work for $5/month + multiple DO images now cost monthly fee.
$5/month + tight integration with AWS products is enough for me to move completely off DO. If only AWS had DO's community style documentation, I'd definitely question DO's future viability.
Now a killer IDE from AWS that lets me deploy and configure AWS without leaving the IDE, that's a checkmate move, which I think will be very difficult for me to switch to another cloud provider. Right now things are in flux but I think an in-browser/desktop IDE like Cloud 9 with one click deploy to AWS would be the end game for other cloud providers.