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Comment by rumanator | Hacker News Reader

> An EC2 instance with 2 virtual cores, 4GB RAM and a storage of 80GB costs roughly 37$ a month and a Lightsail instance with the exact same configuration costs 20$ a month which is almost half the cost!

The author completely failed to do his homework. An a1.large instance is only 37$ if it's an on-demand instance. You pay a high premium to be able to pull the switch in the exact minute you cease to need one.

If he's willing to go with AWS lightsail with it's monthly plan, the same a1.medium instance type is about 11.75$/month as a reserved instance, and can be had for about 131$/year as well.

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The Lightsail instance comes with 4TB/mo of free transfer. Even using a small fraction of that transfer on EC2 will cost you more than the instance itself.

Also, creating an instance on Lightsail isn't exactly a monthly commitment. You are free to delete your instance at any time and only pay for the hours you used. It's a lot more flexible than the multi-year commitment you need to make in order to get the best pricing out of EC2.

Keep in mind that lightsail charges you for inbound and outbound data transfer; whereas EC2 only charges for outbound ... so depending on your network usage the 4TB isn’t a guaranteed saving.

Yea and 4TB is $360 which dwarfs everything else.

Okay, I don't get this at all!????

If I want to move 400 TB per month out of Amazon, why can't I just proxy it thru 100 Lightsail instances?

Isn't that much cheaper than paying directly per byte? For that much saving it's probably worth figuring out how to do this. It can't be hard.

Isn't it "free" to move data internally to a lightsail instance, as long as both are in the same DC?

> If I want to move 400 TB per month out of Amazon, why can't I just proxy it thru 100 Lightsail instances?

There are some answers in the lightsail faq[1]:

1. You're limited to 20 instances per account. They'll increase that number on a case-by-case basis, but probably not if you're planning on proxying all your traffic through those instances.

2. If you delete an instance and create a new one, they share the same data transfer allowance.

3. All data transfer (both egress and ingress) applies to the data transfer allowance.

It may still be worth doing the proxy setup, but Amazon seems to have pretty clearly set up limits to make it less desirable.

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1. https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/faq/

There are similarly magic numbers in the database cost. A 2 vCPU/4GB instance is db.t2.medium which comes to about $35/month on demand, plus 120 GB is addt'l ~$13 so it actually comes out cheaper than the lightsail version, and certainly way below the proclaimed $200.

This is one place where Google's cloud platform is better in that it automatically applies continuous use discounts without the guessing games.

In addition to data transfer costs, the Lightsail instance also comes with storage, which will cost you extra on the AWS one.

Not sure if relevant, but A1 is ARM, so not exactly the same.

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