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Comment by netcraft | Hacker News Reader

I personally dont think 45$ per year is going to change habits that much, especially for larger customers who have a lot of public IPs.

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Hobby customers can buy an entire VPS, complete with IPv4 to tunnel through, for 1/4 that

Hobby customers aren't using AWS, by and large. And it's only a matter of time before we see more and more costs for IPv4 down in these tiers as well.

Totally disagree! :)

My monthly costs are minuscule with a reserved with a t4g instance, Lambda, S3 and Cloudfront as my primary usage.

Honestly, it beats out the “budget” VPS providers I was previously using, and is a heck of a lot more powerful/reliable.

I knew I’d get the counter points here on HN, but I’d argue we’re probably the exception here. AWS can be really cheap, but it is easy for things to go wrong. Bandwidth, commonly unmetered at places like OVH or Hetzner, can cost a fortune at AWS if you get attacked. And while AWS will refund you once or twice, after that you’re either left scared or on the hook eventually.

Absolutely! It just happens to be a good fit for me :)

I use very little bandwidth and processing with the vast majority of my projects. In the even that I do need heavy lifting for a couple hours, it still tends to be a pretty minimal cost.

Now for sustained heavy loads/bandwidth… I definitely would look elsewhere for hobby projects.

Edit: and I agree with your point about attacks. I have pretty aggressive monitoring set up around billing.

> Hobby customers aren't using AWS

AWS has the easy to use Lightsail[1] VPS offer with cheapest product at $3.5/mo but they'll likely increase these prices as well, since there's an IPv4 address included.

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/pricing/

I've got a 2GB ram 2 CPU for the same price on IONOS

Counterpoint: My hobby projects all use AWS because that's what I am familiar with, and they have the cheapest prices. I also reuse a lot of resources like a database to further save costs.

AWS have many things, but they most definitely do not have the cheapest prices. Unless you are pricing in convenience.

AWS and the cheapest prices? Ehm sorry, but you will have a hard time finding something that's even more expensive than AWS

Hobby provider most often are already charging for ipv4 addresses.

Already a lot of discussion about this at my job. It’s a lot of $ at scale. We will put a bunch of work in to avoid the fee.

Some companies have been allocating a bunch of pointless IPv4 addresses and I think that's why AWS is doing this. A friend of mine have reduced the number of IPv4 addresses his employer uses by 80% (100+ IPs) in less than a week. That's a huge saving, but those IPs should never have been allocated to begin with.

At $45 a year per IP address you’d have to spend less than a man hour per address to even conceivably approach break even.

And I normally would be worried if my company was focusing on break even initiatives instead of higher impact ones.

Depends how many IPs you're using. If you're using 10, who cares; if you're using 100, I dunno. If it's 1,000 or more, that's real money you probably shouldn't be pissing away. (OTOH, a lot of cloud spend is pissing away money, so what's another $45k/year)

And at 100,000+ it’s worth real engineering

But if you have 100 backend servers that mostly communicate on the internal network/VPC and need their IPv4 mostly for updates, it seems easy to justify standing up a proxy and reconfiguring your template. At least if your engineers aren't in Silicon Valley and thus don't cost you $400/h.

you don't have to break even on implementation. you will get billed every single year, so if you can have two dudes solve this in 3 months, you can break even in 3 years and every year after that you saved money

In most companies that would worry me. That there isn’t anything more impactful to work on than a project that breaks even in 3 years likely is over staffed and I’m likely on the chopping block when things turn south.

Huh, speaking of lots of public IPs, most of MIT's old class A is now owned by Amazon :-(

NetRange: 18.32.0.0 - 18.255.255.255

Why :-( ? There's no way MIT was using more than a tiny fraction of that /8; now it's actually being put to real use, and MIT probably got some money out of it. Everybody wins.

MIT was using it. Not efficiently, but MIT sold addresses that were in use at the time due to what appeared to be IT ineptitude.

It was also shortsighted. It was a massive resource, MIT presumably sold it for under $200M (I assume far under), and now AWS plans to rent the addresses at a rate that will be around $600M per year if they manage to rent them all.

The market is working :-)

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