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Comment by tessro | Hacker News Reader

It's worth noting that the quoted "$0.50 a month" only applies for the first year, after which it will cost $0.02 an hour or ~$15 a month.

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Seems like a perfect use case for EC2 on demand. Only run the VPN node when you are on an open wireless network and need the VPN security. Shut it down otherwise.

That would make it harder to run, but it would greatly reduce the cost. I'd pay $0.02 for an hour's worth of security while stopping off at a coffee shop.

It wouldn't be much harder to run. You can start and stop the instance using the command line tools, so you could easily wrap the whole lot into a script which started the server and brought up the VPN link, then when youre finished take down the link then the server, all in once command.

The API-based management is what makes cloud providers really special.

Hopefully these scripts would eventually evolve into a client management panel, making this as easy to the general populace as Firesheep.

Amazon should bundle it together and offer it as a service.

Honestly, there are so many VPN providers that EC2 looks like overkill for this.

Care to list some decent ones? I'd be interested, but haven't looked for them much.

I have used www.tektonic.net since 2004 and have been pleased with their service.

That appears to be a VPS provider, not a VPN. And it costs more than 0.02$/hour on demand.

Sorry, misunderstood the question.

couldnt attackers then grab your EC2 dashboard cookie and possibly compromise your EC2 instance ?

I mean if you need to login there first via an unsecure session, its not really that much safer

But the EC2 login should be via https, although I'm not 100% sure that is actually the case.

Your AWS dashboard would be compromised if you waited until you were on the open wireless network to run the EC2 instance, but attackers would not be able to compromise the EC2 instance. Once the instance has been created you can't change the Key Pair. You also can only download the private key associated with the Key Pair once, which is right when you create it. But of course, an attacker could stop or terminate your instance if he gained access to your AWS dashboard.

Not true: the dashboard runs entirely on SSL - which is still encrypted on an open wifi network. Compromising SSL isn't out of the question though, but highly unlikely.

The AWS console runs entirely over SSL, so it is secure. E.g. https://console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/home

The amortized cost of a reserved instance is only $7.47 per month.

Only if you choose the 3 year reserved micro instance plan. Both the 1yr and 3yr plans are $0.007 per hour, with different one-time fees:

1yr: $54 one-time fee: $0.007 * 24 * 365 = $61.32 + $54 = $115.32 / 12 = $9.61 per month.

3yr: $82 one-time fee: $0.007 * 24 * 365 = $61.32 * 3yr = $183.96 + $82 = $265.96 / 36 = $7.39 per month.

http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/

Whoops, yes, $7.39. I was taking the prices from memory and remembered the $82 as $85.

however spot instance prices run very close to reserved instance prices.

Right, which is why the myriad other VPN solutions are a better deal.

You might be able to signup for a new account and get another free year.... if the deal is still on by then.

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