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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

#191

Post by STRML »

JonoBB wrote: post #178
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"?

It's just an artifact of network-attached storage.

Many competitors just use local storage, which comes with its own serious downsides for the company and customer. DigitalOcean just recently launched its Volumes service, but it's very limited compared to EBS, and not nearly as fast as its local SSDs.

EBS is generally fine but I would really enjoy the option to have ~40GB local SSDs for caching (but I suppose you can always grab an r3/r4 and cache in memory if that's your bag).

The best cloud I/O perf I've seen, bar none, comes from Joyent's Triton containers. Beats even DO by 3-4x. Beyond that you need to go bare-metal.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#192

Post by jedberg »

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.

It's more valuable to be in use than to sell it to you. They are very limited on ipv4 space, so the charge is really a penalty for keeping that resource from another customer.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#193

Post by Someone1234 »

forgottenacc57 wrote: post #177
arcticfox wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I did. They don't.

They offer billing alerts, have a budget tracker thingy, but have no actual automated caps. Closest thing you can do is write one yourself using the AWS APIs.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#195

Post by The_suffocated »

geerlingguy wrote: post #79
prashnts wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, if you have a Static IP attached to the VPS and you first Stop, and then Destroy your instance, you will need to make sure you "free" the IP as well to avoid _small_ 0.005/hr price. From FAQ: > What do Lightsail static IPs cost? > They're free in Lightsail, as long as you are using them! You don't pay for a static IP if it is attached to an instance. Public IPs are a scarce resource and Lightsail is committed t…

> $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.

Would anyone please tell me which of Linode, DigitalOcean and Vultr have cost ceilings? I looked at their pricing pages but couldn't figure out. They all claim that they have monthly billing caps for the hourly rates, but meanwhile, both DO and Vultr have per-GB charges if the transfer quota are exceeded, and Linode is silent on this on its pricing or FAQ pages. Can the data transfer charges be capped too? If so, what happens when the quota is reached?

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#196

Post by blhack »

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'm sure they see it that way. The problem here is that they aren't a utility unless the utility was also selling air conditioners and microwaves, and those air conditioners and microwaves had a button that said "Charge met 10x my normal bill this month" on them.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#197

Post by daveguy »

forgottenacc57 wrote: post #177
arcticfox wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That is only for automated reporting and alerts. It does not allow you to actually limit your expenses.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#198

Post by RKearney »

anilshanbhag wrote: post #49
xyzzy123 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right but one of those 3 (linode) has been pretty brutally hacked (a number of times, at the control plane level) while DO & AWS have a different security story.

True, but that is a little exaggerated. Yes, they were hacked in the past (over a year ago); one of their small data centers went down. Their US East center has been solid for the past 8 months that I have been using, no hiccups.

I wish I could say the same for US South (Atlanta). Constant DDoS attacks, outages, power failures, hardware failures, and more. I don't think I've ever gone longer than 3 months of uptime there across multiple linodes.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#200

Post by bduerst »

RUG3Y wrote: post #126
infinitone wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its all about the over-ear mate.. over-ear..

Haha ok...I guess technically I'm wearing "over-ear" headphones right now. Hyper-X...pretty cheap gaming headset, extremely comfortable, no flashing led lights or other weird gamer features. Decent sound too.

This is a silly question, but do they go fully around the ear?

I have bigger ears and a get a lot of discomfort from most headphones. I have a pair of Audio Technica ATH-A900X (with huge cans) at home, but I'm always hunting for a cheaper pair to carry around with me.

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