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Comment by Rapzid | Hacker News Reader

I have a lot of questions/problems with this. Here are two.

1.) They mention in the compare tiers "Application traffic monitoring" for Advanced. However in the FAQ: "In addition, customers can also use AWS WAF to protect against Application layer attacks". WAF is only available through CloudFront, and CloudFront charges 600 dollars a month for a custom SSL certificate with dedicated IP.

So do they have "Application traffic monitoring" outside of WAF? I'm lead to believe not.

2.) They mentioned multiple times you can call on the DRT team to help you. However buried in the FAQ is this little gem: "Response times for DRT depends on the AWS Support plan you are subscribed to".

So for 3k/mo I can't get better than 24/hr turnaround when I'm under attack without ALSO having a business/enterprise support plan?

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As per the pricing page, looks like you _do_ need support plan:

"AWS Shield Advanced is available to customers who are enrolled in either the Enterprise or Business Support levels of AWS Premium Support."

https://aws.amazon.com/shield/pricing/

Oh wow, thanks! I hadn't noticed that yet :| So many caveats to this thing.

Look like I'd need to pony up >1k/mo on top of 3k to get access to the service then...

AWS is not the place to be if you're on a budget

How often are people on a budget the target of serious ddos attacks?

The government

A better question would be, "How often are people on a budget the target of a budget DDOS attack?" I think we've long since entered the era where DDOS attacks don't have to be "serious" to be massive.

Pretty often, especially in the realm of journalism (Wikileaks et al) and especially in network-security journalism. (Imagine writing exposés about botnet-owners. Imagine what kind of DDoS results from that.)

Yes and Amazon is the company to go running to if you are doing things that the establishment does not like. I don't think so.

Brian Krebs is basically who you're talking about. https://krebsonsecurity.com/

A lot of game servers (eg Minecraft) get DDoSed by competitor servers or players as revenge

More generally: I think a decent fraction of the people who think DDoSing is an appropriate way to deal with personal vendettas are kids. The targets of kids' vendettas are often also kids. Kids tend to have low budgets. (The budget required to launch a DDoS, through one of the many commercial websites that sell them, is pretty low.)

See above, business level support 24/7 with phones is $100/month.

For people paying less than 1k on their bill, or am I missing something? I feel pretty confident in the layout I... Laid out.

Hmmm, reading further, there is a 12-month commitment on the $3,000/month plan.

So if you get hit by DDOS, you can't just pay $3,000 and hope that DDOS is gone within a month. Looks like you have to sign up for a year's worth of protection.

for $3k/month i wouldn't expect a competent human being to be on call 24/7, which is what you're asking for.

this is one thing that does not enjoy economies of scale. competent people working under pressure at 3AM on a holiday are extremely expensive.

would _you_ do that job? and how much do you get paid?

Why? It isn't dedicated support. A single support rep could have hundreds of theoretical clients.

Amazon.com manages to have 24/7 chat support and they certainly aren't charging $3K/month. That's just the power of multi-tasking.

sounds like you've stumbled onto a fantastic entrepreneurial business opportunity. i say you should go for it!

I think you're being rather uncharitable to the GP. Essentially no host, managed or unmanaged, has a 1 engineer:1 customer ratio.

Most of the big names in DDoS protection, looking only at enterprise tier support, have tens of clients per network support tech minimum.

What, clone aws and offer better support?

I feel like you're trying to mock him for being so self evidently wrong that it's (apparently) funny, but I don't see it. How does criticism of a support model lead to "then you do it"?

Or are you implying something else? That's what I hate about these coy between-the-lines replies in chat forums. It's not obvious and I don't know what to reply to! Just say what's on your mind, don't play games. Give the rest of us a chance to reply to something.

/rant, sorry :)

Rackspace and DosArrest are two companies that currently provide me with competent support 24/7 for products that cost less than $3k/month.

They're out there, you just have to look.

No one in this thread bothered to check Amazon support pricing. It's $100/month.

https://console.aws.amazon.com/support/plans/home?region=us-...

$100/month is the MINIMUM for Business tier support. If you spend $2K on AWS services then it is $200, $3K is $300, $4K is $400, and so on... Up until $10K total AWS spend then it drops from 10% of spend to 7%, and from 7% to 5% over $80K.[0]

Enterprise tier's minimum is $15K by the way.

And the Business Tier lacks "Business-critical system down" support with a 15 minute response time. But it does have the "Production system down" level with a "less than 1 hour" response.[1]

AWS's support isn't cheap. And it isn't simply "$100/month" that's the minimum for real support (and no, developer tier isn't real support for production systems).

[0] https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/pricing/

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/compare-plans/

That's not that expensive.

If you bought a rack of servers and storage from HP, IBM or Dell and wanted a tier that got you to an engineer in <15m, that would cost far more.

24/7 Business support starts at $100/month and includes phone support.

We have Enterprise level support which starts at $15,000/month and is very comprehensive. Then again we also have 90k employees.

https://console.aws.amazon.com/support/plans/home?region=us-...

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