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Comment by zenocon | Hacker News Reader

The problem with AWS reserved instances is their limitations on modification later http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ri-modify... -- if you grow and need more capacity, you're kinda stuck unless you have Amazon Linux AMI. It would be nice if you could upgrade RDS instance, for example -- but I don't think that is possible.

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If you have a US bank account you can sell it and buy another that fit your needs.

Annoyingly, you can't resell RDS reserved instances. Just EC2. We're stuck paying for a m3.large heavy and our newly upgraded m3.xlarge on-demand.

Oh, sorry, I did not know about that! It need some extra planning before buying it.

Cept it can be hard to plan for smaller companies. If your startup is a fail, you don't need anything. If it is bootstrapping, you might need a medium or large for a DB. If you are hitting it huge, you need all you can get.

The pricing system with reserved instances is fine for a stable business with 10% yearly growth, not good for a startup.

As a user I would totally just prefer a discount for using more, but I can also see why amazon doesn't want to have a bunch of hardware that is 1 year old and no one wants to use it (but couldn't they just adjust the price to make it valuable still? )

You can choose on-demand instances till calibrate your growth. You can also use load balancing, starting new servers as need.

Sometimes. I've had poor luck selling reservations, especially if the instance type is no longer current (as often happens). I've had instances sit on the market for the better part of a year, at less than half "list price", and not sell.

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