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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

#171

Post by jl6 »

old-gregg wrote: post #66
anilshanbhag wrote: post #18

Here is a comparison of $20 instances across DO, Linode and LightSail All have 3TB transfer Linode(Best): 4GB RAM, 2 Core, 48 GB SSD DO: 2GB RAM, 2 Core, 40 GB SSD LightSail(Worst): 2GB RAM, 1 Core, 40 GB SSD I use this exact instance on Linode for my site https://dictanote.co ; that one extra core makes a lot of difference when you want to take a backup of db or something intensive like that.

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.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#172

Post by dsmithatx »

Someone1234 wrote: post #61
johnqpub wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I'd welcome an account suspend instead of bill shock. The big question here is what to do with stateful data. Would you accept an immediate deletion of all of your S3 data? RDS instances and snapshots?

I said suspend, not removal. They could easily cut off public access to those resources while charging you storage fees. Obviously with any kind of ceiling there are certain details that need to be ironed out (i.e. most people wouldn't want configuration information or data to be lost, but they likely would want VPS to be taken offline and other services to be suspended). Ultimately for most startups, small businesse…

SNS topics and lambda jobs. Just use the API to add a firewall rule to block traffic when it gets a billing SNS alert. Should be pretty simple to get working.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#173

Post by blinkingled »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #55
blinkingled wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah the LightSail pricing doesn't look attractive at all. $40 if you need to get 2 cores - and dual core really should help with anything non-trivial.

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.

Right of course - I assumed most all top tier providers are good at managing capacity and you do get the two cores to yourself more or less.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#175

Post by RussianCow »

Domenic_S wrote: post #125
lucasmullens wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. They could sell the IP address to someone else.

But... they're selling it to you.

I think the point is that there's a reason they charge you for it instead of letting you hold onto it for free.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#177

Post by forgottenacc57 »

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…

Amazon lets you set a cost limit in your account. Look it up.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#178

Post by JonoBB »

STRML wrote: post #163

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,…

The terrible IOPS performance on AWS is the biggest downside for me.

All competitors seem to outstrip AWS on this. Do they have some legacy infrastructure that is just too big too upgrade to something more modern, or is this "on purpose"?

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#179

Post by Someone1234 »

slig wrote: post #34
jqueryin wrote: post #15

My guess is Amazon wants to rope people into their ecosystem, and they've recognized that many startups have opted for the cheaper VPS providers in their bootstrap days. This is an intriguing move and one that I'm sure DigitalOcean, Linode, and Vultr have been fearing may happen. The pricing is on par with these alternatives in the VPS space.

> The pricing is on par with these alternatives in the VPS space. Linode offers the double of the RAM for the same price for $10, $20 and $40 VPSs.

A lot of people, myself included, don't seriously consider Linode anymore given their security problems (March 2012, 2013) and infrastructure problems (Dec-Jan 2015-16).

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#180

Post by drabiega »

paulrosenzweig wrote: post #150
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…

I think it comes down to them seeing themselves as a utility. You wouldn't want to be prompted for payment confirmation every time you plug something into an outlet, but this does mean that you'll have a huge unexpected charge if you accidentally leave on the air conditioner when you go on vacation.

I think part of the reason that utilities can get away with this is the fact that the maximum bill you are likely to run up is generally 2x-3x your normal bill. This doesn't well for Amazon because your actual bill can be orders of magnitude larger than what you expect.
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