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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

#261

Post by mappu »

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.

BuyVM offer non-shared cores at a cheaper rate than either Linode or DO.

https://buyvm.net/kvm-dedicated-server-slices

(No affiliation, happy customer with minimal downtime for ~5 years now.)

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#262

Post by kuschku »

fabian2k wrote: post #113
creullin wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They say on the FAQ: >For every Lightsail plan you use, we charge you the fixed hourly price, up to the maximum monthly plan cost. Wording implies the monthly pricing is a 'maximum' price.

Traffic is the big item that can add additional charges: > Data transfer overages above the free allowance are charged at $0.09/GB. On the $5 instance the second TB (at $90) is 18 times as expensive as the instance itself with the first TB included.

Wow. That traffic is almost 50 times more expensive than at hosters of dedicated servers, or when you buy it directly from Tier 1 or Tier 2 networks.

Hetzner charges 1.36€ per Terabyte of traffic, and with most servers, gives you 10-20TB included.

I’ve heard people talk about the ridiculous traffic costs of AWS, but this is an entirely new dimension of expensive.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#263

Post by diegorbaquero »

olegkikin wrote: post #249
zzzcpan wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

There are also many less known VPS providers with truly great deals. I've been using these two: NodeServ: $1.25/month = 50GB HDD, 512MB RAM, 1 core, 1TB bandwidth, location in Jacksonville. Host.us: $6/month = 150GB HDD, 6GB RAM, 4 cores, 5.12TB bandwidth, location in Dallas. Both deals found on LowEndBox.

LowEndBox and LowEndTalk are awesome, been following for years. CyberMonday got me KVM with 8GB RAM for $10.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#264

Post by shiftpgdn »

jedberg wrote: post #192
Domenic_S wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

IPv4 allocation limits are still mostly a scare tactic to get people onto v6. I know dozens of people from my webhosting days with /12 and /16 allotments doing nothing that they pay peanuts for. This isn't a unique scenario.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#265

Post by kuschku »

0xmohit wrote: post #94
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).…

Isn't $80 for a 2-core processor a bit high especially if they are competing with Digital Ocean?

And DO is already immensely expensive compared to VPS at OVH, or actual dedicated hardware at Hetzner, OVH, Online.net, Scaleways, KimSufi, however they are all called.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#266

Post by diegorbaquero »

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…

Exactly my thoughts. EC2 is stupid expensive in BW. If you are spending a lot just setup some reverse proxy :)

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#267

Post by unclebucknasty »

Pyxl101 wrote: post #206
zwischenzug wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's difficult to come up with a good model for how a billing ceiling would work in software as a service. A good start would be to fully specify what behavior you desire when an account hits its billing limit. Are you expecting everything to keep working like normal while the cloud provider pays the bill for those resources, or are you expecting the provider to fully shut everything down in a way that prevents the a…

I wonder if itemizing payments per service would help? You'd then only incur suspension for services you couldn't afford. Maybe this in combination with some form of prepays?

So maybe a couple of EC2 instances go down, but you pay for and keep S3, Dynamo, etc. At least enough to salvage or implement a contingency. You'd still owe Amazon the money.

It's tempting to wonder why Amazon would incur that risk, but it is a risk already inherent to their post-pay model, and it serves as good faith mitigation to the runaway cost risk that is currently borne by the customer.

Not perfect, but maybe a compromise.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#268

Post by shiftpgdn »

olegkikin wrote: post #249
zzzcpan wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

There are also many less known VPS providers with truly great deals. I've been using these two: NodeServ: $1.25/month = 50GB HDD, 512MB RAM, 1 core, 1TB bandwidth, location in Jacksonville. Host.us: $6/month = 150GB HDD, 6GB RAM, 4 cores, 5.12TB bandwidth, location in Dallas. Both deals found on LowEndBox.

Your lesser known VPS providers probably have lower tier bandwith, more crowded hypervisors, old virtualization tech or old hardware.

That's not to say getting a 8GB openVZ vps for $4 a month isn't an amazing deal, but just that there are caveats.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#269

Post by jedisct1 »

Lightsail: $5/mo 512 MB, 1 core, 20 GB SSD, bandwidth cap -- Scaleway: $3.2/mo 2 GB memory, 2 cores, 50 GB SSD, unmetered bandwidth.

Lightsail 2: $10/mo 1 GB memory, 1 core, 30 GB SSD, bandwidth cap -- Scaleway: $10/mo 8 GB memory, 6 cores, 200 GB SSD, unmetered bandwidth.

OVH virtual servers have also always been cheaper than Lightsail, and bandwidth is of course unmetered: https://www.ovh.com/us/vps/vps-ssd.xml

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#270

Post by manacit »

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"?

As @STRML said, the difference is that Amazon is using network attached (EBS) storage as the primary instance storage, instead of local SSD. This provides a ton of benefit to Amazon, and some benefit for the user as well: CoW backend allows for nearly instant snapshots and clones, multi server/rack redundancy with EC, ability to scale up with provisioned IOPS easily, etc.

The downside is that the access methods for blocks mean some operations are more computationally and bandwidth intensive, meaning you will get fewer IOPS and less sustained throughput without paying more money. In addition, there is always going to be a bit more latency when going over the network versus a SAS RAID card.

As with all things in life, it's a tradeoff. If you look at other large providers' (GCE, DO at least) network storage offering, you'll also see a significant performance regression from local SSD.

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