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Comment by meritt | Hacker News Reader

Is there anything preventing me from using these servers as proxies with incredibly cheap bandwidth? I assume it stacks? When we reach transfer limits I can just spin up an additional $5 instance to add another 1TB?

$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!

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Precisely right. It will be fascinating to see if Lightsail creation can be automated via Terraform or Cloudformation, and the $0.09 per GB for outgoing bandwidth can be easily subverted with this new pricing structure.

Sort of. Lightsail service limits:

"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.

Transfer is how they really make money. If you use a lot of services (especially spot pricing) and only pay 10% of bandwidth charges it will likely hurt them, so not sure if they'll allow it if many people start doing that.

Immediately thought about this "solution" to bandwith overage charges as well. Would not be surprised if it ended up getting you disabled for abuse or going against the TOC, etc.

The documentation for LightSail specifically calls out integration with other AWS services, how to get them connected via private IPS, etc.

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.

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