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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

#271

Post by gknoy »

dsmithatx wrote: post #172
Someone1234 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's still a very striking omission of a feature.

Lambda isn't available in all zones, and not everyone has the time/ability/knowledge to set up such a thing. I'm sure I could do it, but only if I were to spend a few hours researching it, and probably a few nights working on such a solution. I'd also have to trust that I didn't mess it up -- I'd hate to have a bunch of traffic and NOT properly prevent the traffic.

This is the kind of thing that Amazon surely could provide easily if they wanted to.

It's like if your phone company didn't give you an option to limit your spending (prepaid), but said that you could use their arcane API to tell them each month to start/stop service. That's great, but not really very nice to customers.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#274

Post by edgartaor »

dispose13432 wrote: post #230
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?

My question is why does no one talk about prgmr?

Do you have experience with prgmr? It's reliable enough for a small project?

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#275

Post by manacit »

dfrey wrote: post #21

I guess this service might prevent people from migrating off Amazon services to DigitalOcean (or other VPS providers), but I don't really see a compelling reason to use this service instead of DigitalOcean.

I think this could quickly change in the 6 month to 1 year horizon as Amazon (potentially) adds onto this product with other AWS services built into this product.

Imagine if you could easily spin up DB instances and create LBs within LightSail - they would offer more features than DigitalOcean (or any other "VPS Provider"), while being price and usability competitive.

I would definitely be nervous if I was DigitalOcean - there are still advantages (support, tutorials, etc), but this closed the gap significantly.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#276

Post by JonoBB »

byuu wrote: post #161
2bluesc wrote: post #57

Price breakdown vs DigitalOcean, VULTR and Linode. Of course all things are not equal (i.e. CPUs, SSDs, bandwidth, etc). Provider: RAM, CPU Cores, Storage, Transfer ---------- $5/mo LightSail: 512MB, 1, 20GB SSD, 1TB DO: 512MB, 1, 20GB SSD, 1TB VULTR: 768MB, 1, 15GB SSD, 1TB ---------- $10/mo LightSail: 1GB, 1, 30GB SSD, 2TB DO: 1GB, 1, 30GB SSD, 2TB VULTR: 1GB, 1, 20GB SSD, 2TB Linode: 2GB, 1, 24GB SSD, 2TB --------…

More of the same with Ramnode. Really not a lot of competition, is there? Every plan starts around $5/mo for a KVM instance, and each tier increases all of the specs, while doubling the monthly fees each time. No ability to customize to your specific requirements. What if I need a lot of CPU power, but not much bandwidth? What if I want lots of RAM, but don't need much disk space? What if I'd rather have an HDD with…

Dediserve offer this

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#278

Post by bhouston »

2bluesc wrote: post #57

Price breakdown vs DigitalOcean, VULTR and Linode. Of course all things are not equal (i.e. CPUs, SSDs, bandwidth, etc). Provider: RAM, CPU Cores, Storage, Transfer ---------- $5/mo LightSail: 512MB, 1, 20GB SSD, 1TB DO: 512MB, 1, 20GB SSD, 1TB VULTR: 768MB, 1, 15GB SSD, 1TB ---------- $10/mo LightSail: 1GB, 1, 30GB SSD, 2TB DO: 1GB, 1, 30GB SSD, 2TB VULTR: 1GB, 1, 20GB SSD, 2TB Linode: 2GB, 1, 24GB SSD, 2TB --------…

Are cores really comparable between DO and Lightsail. Are we sure that 1 core isn't really something not quite a real core but something that is already over allocated based on the assumption of less than 1 core of actual usage? Thus we need to know what the actual over allocation number is to realy figure out if they are comparable.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#279

Post by solatic »

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…

The correct answer, as always, is to ask the customer.

Let's take a simplistic example and say you're paying per gigabyte. You decide you're willing to pay up to $X, and Amazon tells you ahead of time how much your $X will buy you, and you accept.

One type of customer will be using that storage to store priceless customer photos. Even if the customer ends up deleting the photos, it has to be your customer who makes that decision - not you, and not Amazon. You tell Amazon that you'd like an alarm at $X-$Y, but that if you hit $X, keep going, at least until you hit $X+$Z.

Another type of customer will be using it to store a cache copy (for quicker retrieval) of data backed up in a data warehouse somewhere. You tell Amazon that you'd like a policy which automatically deletes all the oldest data, to guarantee to stay under the limit.

Yet another type of customer would rather keep their old data and just return an error code to the user for stuffing too much new data into too little storage, so basically, guarantee to stay under the limit, and guarantee never to delete data.

You can't solve billing until you communicate with your customers and ask what they want.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#280

Post by tomc1985 »

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…

How much does data at rest really cost Amazon? And how much of that cost is simply opportunity costs?

Most companies will hold onto your data for a time, then delete it afterwards.

This doesn't smell like technical concerns to me. It smells like sneaky Amazon-wants-to-make-more-money concerns.

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