Amazon Lightsail 1GB Is No Match for $10 VPS from Linode, DO
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This is not an acceptable time format.
Back in 2011 when I was running multiple clusters of big (t2.xlarge style) instances I was seeing massive but seemingly random slow-down issues. I'd naively assumed it was 'the netflix neighbours', and/or STW GC issues with the JVM we were using, mostly because the cpu credit computation wasn't well known at the time.
I have had serious performance issues at Digital Ocean, which is one reason I moved away from them and to Vultr (the main reason being Vultr's support for uploading your own custom ISO; OpenBSD in the cloud is cool). One example of many: I ran a custom website on DO for a client for a couple of years, but it was constantly going down despite the logs showing no significant traffic spikes and no Apache or PHP errors. I moved it to a shared hosting plan with my reseller provider and it has been up 100% since, not counting planned downtime.
All of that said, if I ever start experiencing the issues you're describing, I'll move on in a heartbeat. I don't do anything mission critical on Vultr, it's mostly for testbed stuff and that Minecraft server, nothing I can't move to another provider with ease.
Honestly, even using EC2 c4 (compute) or r3 (memory) instances it is hard to match the benchmarks of larger DigitalOcean droplets in terms of I/O. EBS is just really hard to get performance out of unless you use local disks and storage optimized instances.
Unlike the AWS EC2 Web Console, Lightsail makes it very simple to to create a VPS: pay Y per month for a server than can do X.
Sounds like CPU throttling is not an on/off thing but kicks in gradually.
The obvious followup question: is lightsail the same interface / setup as normal AWS so that this would indeed work? or is it some sort of vastly simplified separate thing?
You choose either the base OS, or an app stack (like Nodejs, or LAMP), then the price you want to pay, then name the machine.
lowendtalk.com can show ya what Lightsail is competing against, IMO more BW, SSD Space and less aggressive throttling are needed if they are to compete with even the higher end of that market, it comes off as a stingier knockoff of Digital Ocean & Linode.
Full disclosure: I'm a happy linode customer.
Can I just buy 1 TB of transfer for $5 and you can keep the server?
If so, you could route all your outbound EC2 internet traffic through a pool of Lightsail servers. You're right that it's an order of magnitude cheaper. 1TB is $5 through Lightsail v.s. $90 through regular EC2.
[0]https://amazonlightsail.com/docs/#faq (How does my data transfer allowance work?)
It'd be relatively straightforward to put a proxy in front of S3. It'd end up be 19x cheaper (pool of 1TB @ $5 Lightsail servers) for bandwidth on the low end and 5.5x cheaper on the high end (pool of 5TB @ $80 Lightsail servers). Compare that to $90 / TB for standard S3 outbound to internet pricing!
My only problems with Linode thus-far have been KVM related bugs. The older Xen type instances never had problems at all, at the second to largest size of Linode though I've run into a series of KVM bugs that cause the VM to lockup entirely or pause for seconds to minutes. Its frustrating, but they have been incredibly helpful in fixing the problems as they come up. I have a hard time everytime it happens of considering moving... and I always end up staying with them.
In fact, one thing this highlighted for me is that Linode disables AppArmor on their kernels (running Ubuntu 16.10) — which seems like a slightly shitty thing to do, especially for a company with a somewhat flaky security history — whereas OVH doesn't.
I've worked with linode, do, and aws over the years. I'll skip do as they're fairly similar to linode but I haven't used them enough to have explicit examples, and will therefore compare linode and aws.
Off the bat, you get a lot more bang for your buck at linode, in terms of compute and storage. If you're running a single server, don't care too much about what's on it or having many nines of uptime - go for linode. I still use them for hosting a few dinky personal projects.
If you're looking to do more though, say something involving hundreds of instances and thousands of interactive requests per second, and every second of downtime means real pain, then raw compute is far from your only consideration.
When we had dire issues with jitter on the xen packet scheduler with linode which was causing memcached requests to get stuck linode support really tried, but drew a blank - we had to tell them the solution and beg them to implement it, which they did - but it took a month, and it cost customer confidence, revenue, my sanity. It's little things like being limited to 50Mb/s node interconnect that make life unnecessarily hard. I absolutely understand why that was the case there, and was very grateful to the folks there tweaking our XPS settings so we wouldn't end up with our packets essentially being quantised, but it was the kind of thing that you really don't want to have to deal with - like moving into a house (admittedly running a heavy industry out of it), and then finding that the windows emit gamma rays on Tuesday when it rains - it took an absurd amount of work to figure out what was going on.
We moved to AWS in the wake of this and other similar issues. Big. Bureaucratic. Expensive. Reliable. Knowledgable. Cheaper than failure.
While since moving to aws we saw occasional and sometimes substantial weirdness within amazon's stack, they would always escalate and resolve major issues very swiftly. The longest we ever waited was a week, on something that required a global change, as we'd discovered a major problem with failure behaviour of one of their beta services. They talked to us every day. The management tools and api are comprehensive, the ecosystem encompasses most services you might want but doesn't get in the way of rolling your own, and they're remarkably flexible in what they'll reconfigure for you if you ask with a good reason. Paying £100k+ a month probably didn't hurt either.
The long and the very short is that you aren't purely paying for hardware when renting compute, you're paying for everything surrounding it. AWS cost more, but for the peace of mind of being able to straddle AZs easily and to know that if something on their end goes bang they'll fix it quick it's worth it.
We managed 97% uptime on linode over two years, five nines on aws.
Oh, and as an aside - when you're selling a SaaS solution, your customers have a lot more confidence when you say the basement iron is Amazon, rather than "sorry, can you repeat that? Lipode? Lytrode?".
I really don't want to bash the linode guys - Chris was really helpful in the early days, and the personal touch was awesome, I saw a lot in their "DNA" that was like ours, and as above, I do still use their service - but AWS is kinda in a league of its own when it comes to provisioned compute services.
My general advice is for personal and non-critical/demanding stuff go for bang for buck, but for critical stuff (I.e. Ecommerce) you can't understate the value of a robust and effective support infrastructure.
I remember the really bad old days when I'd have to drive to downtown Chicago at three in the morning to fuck with a physical server in a rack in a colo. So glad to be able to offload that end of things.
More recently, as we outgrew our original colo hardware, we got set up on OVH dedicated servers, which was back-of-envelope cheaper. Between delays in getting hardware online and managing to trigger the DDOS mitigation in a couple different scenarios, with the debugging and frustration you can imagine that entailed, I don't know if that's turned out to be the case. But when you're dealing with AWS (and I imagine the same should be true of GCE & Azure), it's really simple - if you have to ask, you're nothing special. You're not going to exhaust the available hardware. You will never wait N weeks to get another rack operational.