Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

amazonlightsail.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 631 posts

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#211

Post by shadowban_me »

jl6 wrote: post #171
old-gregg wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Such comparisons are nearly meaningless. - What kind of SSD? - What kind of "core"? - How much are you over-provisioned on the physical hardware? People are treating cloud resources like they're commodity, but they are not (cloud service providers make it very hard to compare apples to apples). You can have first-class PCIe SSDs on RAID 10 underneath that virtualized storage, or you can have consumer-grade non-RAIDed…

Luckily, the prices are low enough that you can just test your workload on each.

Luckily, the infrastructure is so inconsistent, you never know what you're going to get.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#212

Post by drewcrawford »

dotancohen wrote: post #147
bryanlarsen wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All low-end VPS offerings use shared cores, so # of cores is a fairly useless comparison unless they also tell you the oversubscription rate or all of your neighbors are idle.

I don't know about the others, but on AWS with the T2.* instances it always seems like I've got the server to myself. They are either well provisioned, or well managed. The burstable CPUs are great.

You do have them to yourself, as long as you don't use them.

T2 instances work on a credit system, where you are allocated X credits per minute. If you use less than you're allocated, you will rack up hours of CPU time (there is some cap). You can see the credits in the AWS dashboard.

Problem is, that buffer you have is also the delay between when you start doing too much work and when you find out you're doing too much work because the instance isn't responding. And it's the delay between when you fix the problem and your balance goes back to "normal".

I recently hosted my personal tree of Fast-Growing-Programming-Language on a T2, and "accidentally" became the #1 google search result for the entire long-tail of every stack trace and every error message. Took me awhile to piece together what was wrong.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#213

Post by hanoz »

geostyx wrote: post #90
sheraz wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the transfer from the aws instances to the lightsail instances not billed if in the save data center?

Transfer to and from other AWS resources is free (see their FAQ).

I'm not seeing that in the FAQ. In my reading it pointedly leaves open the possibility of incurring AWS egress charges when transferring to LightSail.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#214

Post by cpollard0 »

setq wrote: post #142
geerlingguy wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> $0.005/hour That's $3.60/month... seems similar to mail-in rebates—many people forget, and accidentally give Amazon some (mostly) free money. Also, from later in this thread: > FWIW, bandwidth overages at Linode and DO are $0.02 per GB, LightSail is $0.09. It's these seemingly-tiny (but not-so-tiny when I'm running 60-70 VPSes) costs that kill when you get your first bill after a large traffic event.

You're capped at 20 instances as well by the looks. Plus you'll get AWS 'dog shit' support included which is hopeless. Will stick with Linode.

They put the caps on to help with the very problem you are all bitching about; provisioning a ton of resources and getting a big bill. It's very easy to raise the cap.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#216

Post by mbrookes »

byuu wrote: post #161
2bluesc wrote: post #57

Price breakdown vs DigitalOcean, VULTR and Linode. Of course all things are not equal (i.e. CPUs, SSDs, bandwidth, etc). Provider: RAM, CPU Cores, Storage, Transfer ---------- $5/mo LightSail: 512MB, 1, 20GB SSD, 1TB DO: 512MB, 1, 20GB SSD, 1TB VULTR: 768MB, 1, 15GB SSD, 1TB ---------- $10/mo LightSail: 1GB, 1, 30GB SSD, 2TB DO: 1GB, 1, 30GB SSD, 2TB VULTR: 1GB, 1, 20GB SSD, 2TB Linode: 2GB, 1, 24GB SSD, 2TB --------…

More of the same with Ramnode. Really not a lot of competition, is there? Every plan starts around $5/mo for a KVM instance, and each tier increases all of the specs, while doubling the monthly fees each time. No ability to customize to your specific requirements. What if I need a lot of CPU power, but not much bandwidth? What if I want lots of RAM, but don't need much disk space? What if I'd rather have an HDD with…

Well, there's Amazon Web Services (EC2 / EBS), MS Azure, Google Cloud Platform (Compute Engine) to name but three.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#217

Post by cpollard0 »

wildpeaks wrote: post #30
Someone1234 wrote: post #3

Just to be clear: This service is offered by Amazon/AWS themselves, it isn't a third party. That's a question I had when I first clicked, which is why I am answering it here. One big "gotcha" for AWS newbies which I cannot tell if this addresses: Does this set or allow the user to set a cost ceiling? AWS have offered billing alerts since forever. They'll also occasionally refund unexpected expenses (one time thing).…

Exactly, the lack of cost ceiling is the #1 reason I can't pick AWS.

The cost ceiling are the initial resource limits. Maybe you can ask them to lower the limits?

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#218

Post by mrob »

Pyxl101 wrote: post #206
zwischenzug wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Me too. I want protection against my own stupidity, as well as sheer ignorance of the charges. This put me off AWS for years, and I was deeply shocked there was no one-click 'suspend at x$'. For a company that supposedly puts the customer first, this is appalling.

It's difficult to come up with a good model for how a billing ceiling would work in software as a service. A good start would be to fully specify what behavior you desire when an account hits its billing limit. Are you expecting everything to keep working like normal while the cloud provider pays the bill for those resources, or are you expecting the provider to fully shut everything down in a way that prevents the a…

Raise the price by the actual cost of keeping the resources suspended for a week multiplied by the estimated probability of it happening. If that week passes with no additional payment then delete everything. The additional cost doesn't have to be applied to unlimited liability accounts. What's so difficult about that? There's not much worse customer experience than massive unexpected debt. Outages and data loss are minor problems compared to potential starvation and homelessness.
Post reply on HN