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Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

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Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#161

Post by byuu »

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 more storage than a faster SSD? There's nobody offering a "configure your own VPS specs" plan.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#162

Post by zwischenzug »

arcticfox wrote: post #129
blhack wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly it. 5-6 years ago (I think), I signed up for an aws account under the "free" or educational or something tier. AWS was newish at the time, and I wanted to learn about it. Via some accidental clicking in the control panel (trying to get an IP address for the instance, I think?) I ended up getting a bill from them for over $100. Which, to me at the time, was a huge amount of money. It put me off of AWS…

100%. I can't stand it. It's unlimited liability for anyone that uses their service with no way to limit it. If you were able to set hard caps, you could have set yours at like $5 or even $0 (free tier) and never run into that. One of my services had a Google BigQuery "budget" set at $100. One of our test machines went haywire and continuously submitted a bunch of jobs. The "budget" turned out only to be an alarm, an…

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.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#163

Post by STRML »

A compelling product. The dashboard looks great. They even replaced the confusing term "user data" with "launch script", but they fall back into it later. SSH in-browser is great too and can be bookmarked/opened in a fullscreen tab. Uploading (instead of pasting) your SSH pubkey is a bit annoying.

The docs appear to say you can add these to a VPC but I don't see how to do it.

They don't say the SSD storage is local, so I'm sure it's not.

A few runs with `fio` confirms this is EBS GP2 or slower:

The bench: "fio --name=randrw --ioengine=libaio --direct=1 --bs=4k --iodepth=64 --size=4G --rw=randrw --rwmixread=75 --gtod_reduce=1"

Lightsail $5:

  read : io=3071.7MB, bw=9199.7KB/s, iops=2299, runt=341902msec
  write: io=1024.4MB, bw=3067.1KB/s, iops=766, runt=341902msec
DigitalOcean $5:

  read : io=3071.7MB, bw=242700KB/s, iops=60674, runt= 12960msec
  write: io=1024.4MB, bw=80935KB/s, iops=20233, runt= 12960msec
More than an order of magnitude difference in the storage subsystems.

These appear to just be t2.nano instances (CPU perf is good, E5-2676 v3 @ 2.40 GHz, http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench3/8164581).

For advanced users, there isn't much compelling here to make up for the administration overhead. It's a little cheaper than a similar-spec t2.nano (roughly $4.75 on-demand + $3 for a 30GB SSD). The real win is egress cost; you can transfer EC2->Lightsail for free. 1TB of egress would be nearly $90 on EC2, but is only $5 on Lightsail.

In other news, EC2 egress pricing is obviously ridiculous.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#164

Post by cheapsteak »

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 --------…

I closed my VULTR account after getting this email from them

----- Dear Vultr Customer,

Including pending charges, your account is carrying a $5.94 balance.

In order to cover your current balance and your estimated monthly costs, our billing system will automatically deposit $275.00 from your payment method on file in 24 hours.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#165

Post by idm »

zzzcpan wrote: post #114
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 --------…

Curious, why don't you compare with known "non-cloud" hosting companies too, that provide vps services, like ovh, hetzner, leaseweb, etc.? EDIT: Anyone cares to explain his reasons behind a downvote?

Does anybody care about the answer to your question? In all likelihood, the answer is: because that information is even more work to collect.

Your post reminds me of the burden of proof fallacy, in which you create work for other people by asking questions you could easily answer yourself.

If you or anybody posts the comparison you requested, it will surely be upvoted.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#166

Post by Veratyr »

zzzcpan wrote: post #114
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 --------…

Curious, why don't you compare with known "non-cloud" hosting companies too, that provide vps services, like ovh, hetzner, leaseweb, etc.? EDIT: Anyone cares to explain his reasons behind a downvote?

Possibly because (except for Leaseweb), they're all European and of limited usefulness as a result. Linode, Vultr, DO and AWS all have numerous regions around the world.

They're also typically leased for at least a full month and can't be spun up/down on demand like you can with these services.

Plus they focus on large (>16GB) dedicated servers.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#167

Post by edutechnion »

meritt wrote: post #121

Is there anything preventing me from using these servers as proxies with incredibly cheap bandwidth? I assume it stacks? When we reach transfer limits I can just spin up an additional $5 instance to add another 1TB? $5/mo per 1TB of bandwidth = $5.00 / 1024 = $0.0049/GB compared to EC2's normal $0.09/GB -- That's a 91-95% discount on egress data!

Precisely right. It will be fascinating to see if Lightsail creation can be automated via Terraform or Cloudformation, and the $0.09 per GB for outgoing bandwidth can be easily subverted with this new pricing structure.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#168

Post by dsmithatx »

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).…

I use budgets in AWS to send me a text when I get to a certain limit. You could potentially use an SNS topic to take action and shutdown resources I suppose. I guess if you are always traveling or can't get to a computer this could be an issue for you. I can't imagine there are that many people seriously using AWS who could suddenly run up a huge bill that can't respond to a txt or have an friend, coworker, employee or automated task do so.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#169

Post by xeromal »

arcticfox wrote: post #129
blhack wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly it. 5-6 years ago (I think), I signed up for an aws account under the "free" or educational or something tier. AWS was newish at the time, and I wanted to learn about it. Via some accidental clicking in the control panel (trying to get an IP address for the instance, I think?) I ended up getting a bill from them for over $100. Which, to me at the time, was a huge amount of money. It put me off of AWS…

100%. I can't stand it. It's unlimited liability for anyone that uses their service with no way to limit it. If you were able to set hard caps, you could have set yours at like $5 or even $0 (free tier) and never run into that. One of my services had a Google BigQuery "budget" set at $100. One of our test machines went haywire and continuously submitted a bunch of jobs. The "budget" turned out only to be an alarm, an…

I'm pretty sure Azure had that the last time I used it.
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