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Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

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361–370 of 631 posts

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#361

It seems to me the exact same service existed already, by picking a stack on Bitnami's website, and single-click-launching it on AWS. The price structure is clearer on Lightsail though.

Lightsail also uses Bitnami stacks underneath, so it is very similar indeed. It is an easier way to get started with AWS but with the potential to graduate to the full offering

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#362
post #351

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?

Depends what you want to get out of it. I used it for a year to host a crappy blog that got trivial amounts of traffic. It's perfectly fine for its primary use case of getting your feet wet in the AWS ecosystem, learning what all the different features are for, and how to manage them. If you want to do any "real work" you'll blow past what the free tier offers, but that's ok with me.

Yes, you can incur charges if you exceed what's covered by the free tier. Not all AWS services even have a free tier, and those that do are severely limited (1 micro instance, 5GB of S3 storage, etc). You're not off in some sandboxed environment where they just shut you down if you go over the limits. It's more like a monthly credit of $X for the first 12 months of your account. To cover my ass, I set a really low billing alert threshold. Like "email me if my monthly bill ever projects to exceed $1".

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#364

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.

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.

Until you get successful and Amazon copy your implementation.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#365

What a day for AWS on HN. 8 AWS products made it to front page. I've learned new AWS product like Cognito today just from the comments (ironically in the "Google is Challenging AWS" thread). I feel as excited as I was for Azure's Build 2016. Now I'm feeling pulled to AWS. This is great for AWS, not so much for Google Cloud which further fades into obscurity in my mind. I'd love to see that change, more competition in…

Their yearly conference, Re:Invent, is going on this week, so there will probably be more announcements to come.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#366

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.

If you think that solving this problem in a consumer-friendly way is beyond the wit of Amazon then I think you are wrong.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#367
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…

There was this awesome bug with AWS a while back too where you could accidentally sign up an account twice with the same email address, but no way of knowing you had two accounts without paying really close attention to your account ID. So if you went to log in and used your email and one password, you would sign into one account, but if you used the same email and a different password, you would sign into the second…

> There was this awesome bug with AWS a while back too where you could accidentally sign up an account twice

Not a bug, this has been amazon's philosophy with accounts on all systems from very early on. Some of the initial designers of amazon knew families where multiple people shared one e-mail address, but wanted separate accounts for shopping.

Multiple accounts per e-mail address was a concious design decision for all Amazon systems.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I did. They don't. They offer billing alerts, have a budget tracker thingy, but have no actual automated caps. Closest thing you can do is write one yourself using the AWS APIs.

Yeah, gotta monitor daily

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#369
post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of people, myself included, don't seriously consider Linode anymore given their security problems (March 2012, 2013) and infrastructure problems (Dec-Jan 2015-16).

The biggest show stopper for me is the lack of block storage, while both DO and Vultr have it.

They do, however, offer over 2x disk space in some of their plans. 80GB in LightSale and DO vs 192GB in Linode

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 don't really care. My $6/month deal beats any $5/month deal from the major players, and by a huge margin. I recently tested the internet speed on it, and I got 850 real Mbps out of the promised 1Gbps channel, which is good enough for me. I can give Memcached 1GB of RAM and not worry about killing everything else. I have a bunch of sites running on it without stepping on each other, and I doubt that would be the cas…

You're telling me that your 150GB HDD beats a 20GB SSD? Even though they're both going to sit at 10GB free for years.
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