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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

#251

Post by amq »

dictum wrote: post #99
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.

Digital Ocean's pricing has remained the same since 2013. It'd be nice if they bumped the $20 plan to 3GB RAM (or go full Linode at 4GB)

I wish:

  $20
  4GB RAM
  2 CPUs

  $40
  8GB RAM
  4 CPUs
Some VPS providers already have similar offerings.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#252

Post by fieryskiff »

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!

Immediately thought about this "solution" to bandwith overage charges as well. Would not be surprised if it ended up getting you disabled for abuse or going against the TOC, etc.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#253

Post by pavel_lishin »

reid wrote: post #243
ajkjk wrote: post #25

I'm amused by the model they have in their banner: a bearded, tattooed man wearing what appears to be a .. cape? We've come a long way since the stock photos of 'smiling super-normal people wearing ties, huddled around a computer'.

Programming while sitting on a motorcycle? https://amazonlightsail.com/features/

Reminds me of Snow Crash.

> Because shortly after he gets into Port Sherman, the wheels on his motorcycle lock up - the spokes become rigid - and the ride gets very bumpy. A couple of seconds after that, the entire bike goes dead, becomes an inert chunk of metal. Not even the engine works. He looks down into the flat screen on top of the fuel tank, wanting to get a status report, but it's just showing snow. The bios has crashed. Asherah's possessed his bike.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#254

Post by mark-wagner »

reacharavindh wrote: post #40
scosman wrote: post #9

This is the first cheap bandwidth option I've seen on AWS. Transferring 1TB out of S3 or EC2 is costs about $90, but is included in a $5 server with Lightsail.

Looks like you can spin up three of these instances as a proxy and pay $15 for 3 TB of bandwidth from AWS.

Where do you see that? To me it looks like bandwidth is plan-wide. For example, from the FAQ: "If you delete your instance early and create another one, the free data transfer allowance is shared between the two instances."

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#255

Post by danesparza »

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).…

Does this set or allow the user to set a cost ceiling? Probably not. Just based on transfer (network) costs, Amazon Lightsail includes this caveat:

Some types of data transfer in excess of data transfer included in your plan is subject to overage charges. Please see the FAQ for details.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#256

Post by antisthenes »

ghaff wrote: post #118
regularfry wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Smaller hosts will make a decent margin on managed services. That's just not a game Amazon want to get into.

There's a lot of managed services on AWS and it's growing rapidly. But they're delivered through partners, not AWS directly. I didn't write down the numbers from this segment of the Re:Invent Global Partner keynote yesterday but, as I recall, "next generation managed service providers" was highlighted as a big growth opportunity.

I think the point was that Amazon's customer service is awful, compared to smaller, much more nimble companies where you can get a technical person on the line and get much more personalized service from someone in the US.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#257

Post by nielsole »

Guest98123 wrote: post #207

Let me get this straight, right now AWS is billing me $270/mo for 3TB of bandwidth on my autoscaling web servers. With LightSail, I can get that same bandwidth, plus storage and instances for $15/mo? In total, I'm spending about $15,000/yr on AWS, and someone spending $5/mo gets their bandwidth 18x cheaper than me? Shouldn't it be the other way around, and I should be the one with the discount? I get enough headaches…

From https://amazonlightsail.com/docs/

> Data transfer OUT from a Lightsail instance to another Lightsail instance or AWS resource is also free while the private IP address of the instance is used.

It could even be worth it to set Lightsail up as reverse proxy and profit off of very cheap(for AWS) traffic e.g. for S3. I can't really believe they would allow this. Am I missing something?

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#258

Post by loader »

msh wrote: post #201
raitom wrote: post #133

Meanwhile, in France: https://www.scaleway.com/ Same thing with OVH, you can get a powerful dedicated server with unlimited bandwidth for the price of a medium EC2 instance. I hope they will open their datacenter in California soon.

I don't understand how they can live on those prices. I have their 3 euro arm server and have no problem pushing more than a 100 megabit a second from it.

It's two fold. Amazon bandwidth is, I assume, premium tier 1. Where as ovh and scaleway are probably lower tier. Lower tier bandwidth is dirt cheap, like below $0.25 per mbps.

Edit: 3 things, it's also shared among a lot of users that don't use what they can. For everyone using 100mbps there's probably 20 who use less then 1mbps.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#259

Post by bachmeier »

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.

Offering the option to cap expenditures doesn't affect anyone that chooses to not use that feature.
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