171–180 of 336 posts
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OVH and Hetzner have offerings at that price range. you can use a tool like serverhunter.com to find all sorts of economically-priced servers.
Yep, I'm renting two servers from Hetzner; have one in Germany and another in Finland. Both cheap (€40/month) and over the few years I've been using their services, I have nothing to complain about.
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I have to say that my response to "not knowing what you're going to pay for something until you're billed" is basically, "well I guess we'll see if I can pay it then". You sort of start asking yourself, "what if I just don't pay?". I have a (deadbeat) buddy who's entire medical plan is essentially to give a fake name to the ER, and if you're poor in America, what else can you do?
I worked in a couple of emergency rooms for a total of 6 years, and you aren't wrong. Assuming the care you need can be entirely performed within the ER, then that's a viable strategy so long as you don't intend to re-visit the hospital. Hospitals are obligated to provide care regardless of your ability to pay in the moment, and of course they often take care of indigent and foreign patients, with the understanding t…
Aren't inmates technically supposed to get healthcare? Could be a last-ditch option I suppose if you can't get something covered any other way. Personally I'm trying to stay employed to keep my coverage, but sometimes you can't outrun the layoffs.
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> It seems like AWS' entire business model is making the pricing so confusing that you don't know what it will cost until after you've used it. It feels weirdly similar to the US healthcare/insurance situation. Not just the healthcare situation, but everything. There's nothing much more stereotypically American than "not knowing what you're going to pay for something until you're billed." Dozens of little fees on you…
People complain about this relentlessly, but never change. Additionally, every single business owner I know complains that whatever it is they're selling, (1) it isn't worth the brain damage to sell to customers looking for the lowest price, (2) as long as people comparison shop in a harebrained way, hook pricing (aka up front pricing that looks low and turns out high) is only rational. It's not like they're providin…
When it comes to healthcare, they absolutely are. The US spends more than double for the same outcomes as other developed countries.
And no, this isn't because of the cost to develop new and novel drugs (which aren't used in 99.9% of routine health care)
Over the weekend a coworker was helping someone in our lab prepare data for an important conference talk. We accidentally ran up a rather large bill because while the EFS storage pricing was simple enough, the usage pricing bit us. It seems like AWS' entire business model is making the pricing so confusing that you don't know what it will cost until after you've used it. It feels weirdly similar to the US healthcare/…
Complicated cost calculations are only a part of the issue. You (or your team) also have fault in that you did not take the time to understand the costs associated with your decisions and not utilize AWS cost management capabilities (that is assuming you did get a surprise bill in lieu of an alert saying you hit a budget threshold).
And that is in part due to the shift from having dedicated ops teams, to having programmers take on more infrastructure tasks. This isn't unique or novel--incorrectly configured buckets, committing access keys, poor IAM setup, etc happen so frequently due to devs who have no real practical experience managing production infrastructure having unchecked access to AWS.
Both Core Weave & Lambda Labs have fairly predatory pricing making it impossible to rent GPUs without a yearly contract. This doesn't make sense for training models, where a training run is on the scale of days & weeks. I wished that the techcrunch article mentioned other companies, like sfcompute, which offer hourly compute instead of yearly contracts.
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> give a fake name to the ER, and if you're poor in America, what else can you do? The American government spends something approaching a trillion dollars annually on Medicaid, "a government program that provides health insurance for adults and children with limited income and resources."[1] Seperately, Obamacare[2] created a private health insurance market where low income people can obtain free or heavily discounte…
Obamacare is (largely) a failure due to insurance meddling and laws preventing government insurance programs from negotiating prices with drug companies. I'm a healthy individual, not even 30 yet, never smoked, never broken a bone, and never even had stitches in my life. And when I last checked their prices, I was making only $45k/yr. For coverage with Obamacare, I would be paying $350/month for the "catastrophic" pl…
I've bought my insurance on the ACA marketplace since it opened ten years ago. There's no difference I can see between the plans offered on the health insurance marketplace and those offered directly from the websites of the same insurers that offer coverage in my state (Blue Cross, CVS Aetna, United, Ambetter, etc).
The very highest deductible "catastrophic" plan offered on the marketplace in California for a 29 year old has a $9450/year deductible, which is also the maximum out-of-pocket expense for the year if you have this plan. A $100K deductible plan does not exist, and when you enroll during the annual enrollment period or after a qualifying life event, plans take effect the day you make your first payment, not months later.
I'm 10 years your senior and pay less than $350 per month with a lower deductible than the plan quoted above, with no government subsidies.
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Is there a pre-paid option?
Yes. AWS Advance Pay.
Over the weekend a coworker was helping someone in our lab prepare data for an important conference talk. We accidentally ran up a rather large bill because while the EFS storage pricing was simple enough, the usage pricing bit us. It seems like AWS' entire business model is making the pricing so confusing that you don't know what it will cost until after you've used it. It feels weirdly similar to the US healthcare/…
We really need laws that allow customers to set a legally-binding max spend per month on any service, after which it's upto the company to suspend services. This should apply to everything -- cloud compute, healthcare, phone bills, internet services, everything.
If you plan on seeking medical services without going through insurance, the ACA requires providers to provide you with a good faith estimate upfront.
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Kubernetes is only the software layer, a lot of the cost is in the hardware/infrastructure, and in the salary for those experts.
Agreed 100 percent. Software is the easy part. Getting HVAC, power and network up to the levels of cloud providers is difficult to get right and prohibitively expensive. For instance, the cost for a pair of redundant symmetric gigabit fiber is in the thousands a month and may require tens of thousands of construction costs. These quickly add up, and the upfront costs can quickly reach six figures.
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>hook pricing (aka up front pricing that looks low and turns out high) is only rational. Yes, many deceptive business practices are rational acts on the part of the businesses. That doesn't mean they should be tolerated.
I have begun to think of this as a "large population error", and I'm noticing it in a lot of different markets. At small scales, annoying your customers is bad business. You only need to lose a few before it begins to hurt. Customer complaints are more likely to be a consideration in business decisions. At larger scales, a business can begin to preferentially adopt practices intended to drive away some customers. Per…
It's actually very easy (in theory). You (vote for someone who will) ban fraudulent and anti-competitive behavior, sue the offenders and have them pay huge fines. The fact that this very rarely works out is a failure of the political system.