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AWS free tier data transfer expansion

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Re: AWS free tier data transfer expansion

#41

Post by gogopuppygogo »

nanidin wrote: post #39
Epskampie wrote: post #20

AWS free tier is horrible. You have to enter a creditcard to sign up, and then there is no way to prevent it being charged when you go over the limit for some reason. If you get on the frontpage of HN for example, you might be majorly screwed. It's a test account, I just want it to shut down when the limit is reached.

It has been a while since I messed with the AWS panel, but IIRC you can set budget alerts so you’re notified once a threshold is crossed. It’s not a perfect solution, but if you expect to spend $0 then an alert on $0.01 is pretty trivial to set up and goes a long way to prevent end of the month surprises.

An alert is not a cap. They should add a cap to just shut down/delete resources if the cap is hit.

Re: AWS free tier data transfer expansion

#43

Post by belter »

gogopuppygogo wrote: post #41
nanidin wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has been a while since I messed with the AWS panel, but IIRC you can set budget alerts so you’re notified once a threshold is crossed. It’s not a perfect solution, but if you expect to spend $0 then an alert on $0.01 is pretty trivial to set up and goes a long way to prevent end of the month surprises.

An alert is not a cap. They should add a cap to just shut down/delete resources if the cap is hit.

You can use Budgets Actions for that:

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws-cloud-financial-management/...

Re: AWS free tier data transfer expansion

#44

Post by tjoff »

Epskampie wrote: post #20

AWS free tier is horrible. You have to enter a creditcard to sign up, and then there is no way to prevent it being charged when you go over the limit for some reason. If you get on the frontpage of HN for example, you might be majorly screwed. It's a test account, I just want it to shut down when the limit is reached.

The solution is to not use AWS. Is is not a sacrifice to not engage with shady companies.

Re: AWS free tier data transfer expansion

#45

Post by terafo »

nixgeek wrote: post #5

It went from 1GB to 100GB, meanwhile Oracle is offering 10TB on their Free Tier. https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/

They have terrible sign up experience, I'm far from only one who hasn't been able to sign up there because of some cryptic error. When I've tried to google that, there were reports of them requiring using email with full name in it. But changing to that didn't help, using different credit/debit cards didn't help. But prices are quite nice as far as I can tell from the outside.

Re: AWS free tier data transfer expansion

#47

Post by throwaway2016a »

Hamuko wrote: post #21

> Data Transfer from AWS Regions to the Internet is now free for up to 100 GB of data per month (up from 1 GB per region). Is it 100 GB per region or 100 GB across regions? Because it sounds like the latter.

I read it as total. But that's still a good sized increase. Especially if most of your traffic comes out of 1 or 2 regions.

Re: AWS free tier data transfer expansion

#48

Post by swiftcoder »

belter wrote: post #43
gogopuppygogo wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An alert is not a cap. They should add a cap to just shut down/delete resources if the cap is hit.

You can use Budgets Actions for that: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws-cloud-financial-management/...

Note that these are not instantaneous. You can still incur charges before the budget action kicks in and terminates your resources.

Re: AWS free tier data transfer expansion

#49

Post by awsthro00945 »

Epskampie wrote: post #20

AWS free tier is horrible. You have to enter a creditcard to sign up, and then there is no way to prevent it being charged when you go over the limit for some reason. If you get on the frontpage of HN for example, you might be majorly screwed. It's a test account, I just want it to shut down when the limit is reached.

I think AWS drastically needs to create some type of "sandbox account" flag that severely locks down the services you can use and the amount you can scale up, exactly for reasons like you said.

However, I also think a big problem is that many people on the internet and especially people who try to sell AWS tutorials or learning courses push AWS as some toy that every developer should sign up for on a whim without understanding what they are doing. An AWS account is an industrial-grade tool, it's not a toy, and it should be treated as such. It's like renting a backhoe when you don't even know how to use a shovel yet, and then being surprised when you completely screw up your yard.

Sites like acloudguru that offer ephemeral sandbox AWS accounts are becoming more popular, and people new to AWS should really be steered towards those.

Re: AWS free tier data transfer expansion

#50

Post by dfinninger »

nanidin wrote: post #39
Epskampie wrote: post #20

AWS free tier is horrible. You have to enter a creditcard to sign up, and then there is no way to prevent it being charged when you go over the limit for some reason. If you get on the frontpage of HN for example, you might be majorly screwed. It's a test account, I just want it to shut down when the limit is reached.

It has been a while since I messed with the AWS panel, but IIRC you can set budget alerts so you’re notified once a threshold is crossed. It’s not a perfect solution, but if you expect to spend $0 then an alert on $0.01 is pretty trivial to set up and goes a long way to prevent end of the month surprises.

Yes, you can set up a budget alert. I have it set up for one of my work accounts. Problem with that is that it's an email, and there's usually some delay in it going out. It's not a great solution for accidental traffic spikes (surprise HN post, or someone finding and abusing a public S3 object you have hosted, etc).

So you get an email saying your $10/mo site is now $1000 for this month, and climbing.

In general I wouldn't recommend using AWS and expecting the free tier for anything that's going to be public facing or autoscaling.

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