Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS • Hacker News Board

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#281

Post by somecallitblues » Wed, Nov 30, 2016, 8:02 PM UTC

mrob wrote: post #218

Pyxl101 wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Raise the price by the actual cost of keeping the resources suspended for a week multiplied by the estimated probability of it happening. If that week passes with no additional payment then delete everything. The additional cost doesn't have to be applied to unlimited liability accounts. What's so difficult about that? There's not much worse customer experience than massive unexpected debt. Outages and data loss are…

Oh give me a break man. Starvation and homelessness. Deleting customers data is something you don't do. If they can't pay you can write off the bill. But people have committed suicides because of data loss. The parent post nailed it.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#282

Post by unoti » Wed, Nov 30, 2016, 8:02 PM UTC

No nonsense predictable pricing is what drove me to Rackspace years ago. Good for Amazon figuring this out.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#283

Post by gigatexal » Wed, Nov 30, 2016, 8:03 PM UTC

meh the pricing fails in comparison to say linode.com's offerings. https://www.linode.com/pricing

granted with AWS you probably get access to other AWS products so there's that...

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#284

Post by bfrog » Wed, Nov 30, 2016, 8:04 PM UTC

One day their pricing and performance might actually be competitive. Today is not that day.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#285

Post by merb » Wed, Nov 30, 2016, 8:05 PM UTC

STRML wrote: post #188

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,…

Re: VPC peering, the blog gets into more detail. I tried it out, worked great. Simple egress. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-lightsail-the-power-...

well for that money it's really simple to interconnect the 3 and still use all the cool AWS things.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#286

Post by jedisct1 » Wed, Nov 30, 2016, 8:06 PM UTC

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.

Amazon sells at prices people are willing to buy.

Keep in mind that in France, very few people know that Amazon is more than a website selling books and random stuff. But in the US, very few people know about OVH and Scaleway.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#287

Post by Karunamon » Wed, Nov 30, 2016, 8:07 PM UTC

shiftpgdn wrote: post #268

olegkikin wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I just had a look through their ToS for the catch.

For the most part it's reasonable, but there's a freaking litany of reasonable things you're not allowed to run, including IRC, audio/video streaming, game servers, and so on.

Why on earth do you sell me X block of resources for Y$/month if you're going to tell me what I can and can't do with them? Surely unreasonable use would be covered by resource limits already in place?

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#288

Post by bfrog » Wed, Nov 30, 2016, 8:08 PM UTC

dschulz wrote: post #103

I don't see anything disruptive here. I already have roughly the same cost/benefit with Linode.

Correction, you see a piss poor attempt at competing with Linode/DO/Vultr with no guarantees you won't piss away thousands by mistake or suffer magical and impossible to understand performance issues.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#289

Post by secabeen » Wed, Nov 30, 2016, 8:09 PM UTC

This is pretty good. I'm currently paying about $3.50/mo for my existing t2.nano-based reserved VPS, and this provides a lot more space and bandwidth for not much more money. If they offered it with a reserved-instance discount, it would be even more compelling.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#290

Post by xploit » Wed, Nov 30, 2016, 8:11 PM UTC

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'.

Capes are company policy after yesterdays jumper. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-28/amazon-wo...