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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

#351

Post by kzisme »

arcticfox wrote: post #129
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…

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…

Is the free tier even worth trying out? I went to look into it previously, but stopped before entering my CC info.

Can it incur charges even if you've set up the server to only be a free tier?

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#352

Post by mtw »

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 --------…

I'd love to see a comparison on core performance and SSD disk performance

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#353

Post by carlosdp »

robot wrote: post #350
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).…

"Just to be clear: This service is offered by Amazon/AWS themselves, it isn't a third party. " says Someone1234. Should we believe it?

It's an official AWS announcement, so yea...

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#354

Post by nik736 »

kinkdr wrote: post #315
cheapsteak wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I closed my VULTR account after getting this email from them ----- Dear Vultr Customer, Including pending charges, your account is carrying a $5.94 balance. In order to cover your current balance and your estimated monthly costs, our billing system will automatically deposit $275.00 from your payment method on file in 24 hours.

How many instances did you have at the time you received the email? Usually, when I receive an email like this, the amount is equal to the monthly bill of the instances I have active at the moment.

Yes, but it's still stupid. Cloud hosting companies who are using hourly billing are used to spin instances up and down all the time. Imagine your app has a busy day and you need 500% more resources than usual, with the system of Vultr you will be automatically charged 500% of your regular usage only because of one days spike (obviously only if you are near the $0 balance mark)

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#355

Post by cheapsteak »

kinkdr wrote: post #315
cheapsteak wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I closed my VULTR account after getting this email from them ----- Dear Vultr Customer, Including pending charges, your account is carrying a $5.94 balance. In order to cover your current balance and your estimated monthly costs, our billing system will automatically deposit $275.00 from your payment method on file in 24 hours.

How many instances did you have at the time you received the email? Usually, when I receive an email like this, the amount is equal to the monthly bill of the instances I have active at the moment.

I had one $5 instance, which is what made this seem ridiculous

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#356

Post by nik736 »

kuschku wrote: post #299
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?

I expanded it with those companies: Price breakdown vs DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode, OVH, and Online.net / Scaleway: $5/mo | Provider | RAM | Cores | Storage | Transfer | | ---------------------- | ----- | ----- | ---------- | -------- | | LightSail | 512MB | 1 | 20GB SSD | 1TB | | DO | 512MB | 1 | 20GB SSD | 1TB | | VULTR | 768MB | 1 | 15GB SSD | 1TB | | Hetzner (virtual) | 1GB | 1 | 25GB SSD | 2TB | | OVH | 2GB | 1…

Well, you are comparing shitty atom cores to E5 cores. These are just some random numbers without context.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#357

Post by tylerjd »

kzisme wrote: post #351
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…

Is the free tier even worth trying out? I went to look into it previously, but stopped before entering my CC info. Can it incur charges even if you've set up the server to only be a free tier?

Yes, when I was still in high school, I had set up a Munin graphing node on AWS. Well, what I didn't realize at the time was that Munin likes to use a lot of disk IO every time it writes out the graphs. AWS charges for I/O on their SAN (not on local disks, but the free tier doesn't come with local disks), and so I ended up with a $150 bill and only use them now for Route53 (DNS hosting, it is fantastic for that), and S3/Glacier for archival storage.

It is worth trying if just to gain knowledge on AWS. But for hosting, I'd say DigitalOcean

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#358

Post by eropple »

daveguy wrote: post #197
forgottenacc57 wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon lets you set a cost limit in your account. Look it up.

That is only for automated reporting and alerts. It does not allow you to actually limit your expenses.

IIRC, it can fire off to a SNS topic; you can burn down your stuff to your heart's content.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#360

Post by oh_sigh »

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.

If you're going to commit suicide if you lose your data, perhaps you shouldn't rely on the graciousness of a third party to save your data for free.
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