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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

#321

Post by setq »

cpollard0 wrote: post #214
setq wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're capped at 20 instances as well by the looks. Plus you'll get AWS 'dog shit' support included which is hopeless. Will stick with Linode.

They put the caps on to help with the very problem you are all bitching about; provisioning a ton of resources and getting a big bill. It's very easy to raise the cap.

I wasn't complaining about that. I've had 2-3 day turnarounds on "everything is broken" events on normal AWS VPC. Always factor their support offering in as well.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#322

Post by mrob »

somecallitblues wrote: post #281
mrob wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

People have committed suicide over debts too. I'm not suggesting Amazon gets rid of unlimited liability accounts, only that they give customers the choice.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#323

Post by dispose13432 »

mjn wrote: post #305
edgartaor wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I've used it and am happy with it. It's reasonably reliable, but has more downtime than the big providers. I wouldn't run mission-critical software that needs 5 9's uptime on it, but for anything else it's fine, certainly for personal projects. They're transparent with any outages, so you can check up on the outage history on their blog: https://prgmr.com/blog/ It's a small business run by a few people (though it's b…

> in case you want to install a custom OS

Do they let you do that? They don't say that in the purchases page.

Also, how is uptime relative to vultr?

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#324

Post by frandroid »

zwischenzug wrote: post #162
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…

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.

Sounds like a good business idea. Pay $10-50 a month for us to automatically disable your services which go over your stated budget. Free tier at 1 service.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#325

Post by user5994461 »

creullin wrote: post #244
fabian2k wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I get that, but that's after the first TB. For a $5 VPS I'd expect most customers wouldn't go over that.

It's not expected... until your site get unexpectedly featured on HN, reddit or any news site.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#326

Post by hrrsn »

jjcm wrote: post #143

Keep in mind if you are a current EC2 customer and are excited about a cheaper VPS in your region, the VPSs are only available in Virginia. I was pretty excited about a cheaper VPS I could provision in the Sydney area, but these are restricted to a single datacenter.

Damn! I got excited at the prospects of cheap VPSes in Sydney :(

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#327

Post by metafunctor »

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).…

The AWS cost structure is one reasons we switched to a different provider. I feel Amazon has taken metered pricing too far with AWS, especially when the prices aren't really that low. Everything seems to cost extra with AWS, and it's quite hard to estimate beforehand how much a thing will actually cost in practice.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#328

Post by cr0sh »

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).…

While it wouldn't be as easy as what you want, and this certainly wouldn't be the best solution, they say they offer an API.

So in theory (I haven't checked what the API gives you control over - so this may be worthless), you could monitor your instance (bandwidth, time up, disk usage, etc), and if things get out of hand, or approach your limit (whatever it is), you could use the API to say shut down or delete the instance, or throttle the bandwidth (maybe via firewall rules or something?).

Again - this would assume the API allows you to do this (and ideally from within the instance itself - which shouldn't be an issue, I wouldn't think). And again, it shouldn't take this much work (you're right, it should just be a simple control panel setting).

But maybe it's an option for those who have the skills to implement it?

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#330

Post by thecrazyone »

shostack wrote: post #205
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).…

It's like they saw all these consumers being screwed by ISP and cell provider data caps and astronomical accidental overage fees and went "how do we get in on that action?!"

Hehe, sounds pretty much like what they've been doing. Really wish they bring some of that customer centric-ness they talk about to this aspect
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