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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

#411

Post by bigiain »

CJefferson wrote: post #386
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…

"it's reasonable for cloud providers to give billing threshold alerts while leaving the choice of what to do in the hands of the customer.". But, they don't don't give us the choice. I need to keep an eye every moment of every day for an alarm, as hundreds or thousands of dollars rack up. That's the ONE THING I DON'T WANT. I'd take anything else (delete my data, lock everything, whatever) over charging me money I can…

"I need to keep an eye every moment of every day for an alarm"

You know you can make a machine do that for you - right?

In fact all the tools Amazon would use to do this are available to you right now. Cloudwatch, SNS, and Lambda are 98% likely to be all you need - apart from the time to get it set up to do whatever you think is "the right thing".

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#412

Post by bigiain »

tomc1985 wrote: post #280
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…

How much does data at rest really cost Amazon? And how much of that cost is simply opportunity costs? Most companies will hold onto your data for a time, then delete it afterwards. This doesn't smell like technical concerns to me. It smells like sneaky Amazon-wants-to-make-more-money concerns.

From the other perspective it sounds to me like a sneaky "I want Amazon to bear the costs of me failing to pay for the resources I've agreed to costs for and consumed, and give me a bunch of 'grace time' to change my mind later" concern.

( What's a gallon of milk on the shelf really cost Walmart? And how much of it is opportunity cost? If I usually buy 2 gallons a week - why can't I keep taking home a gallon every few days for a month or so after I stop paying, then cut me off afterwards? Sounds like a sneaky Walmart-wants-to-make-more-money concern.)

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#413

Post by CJefferson »

bigiain wrote: post #411
CJefferson wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"it's reasonable for cloud providers to give billing threshold alerts while leaving the choice of what to do in the hands of the customer.". But, they don't don't give us the choice. I need to keep an eye every moment of every day for an alarm, as hundreds or thousands of dollars rack up. That's the ONE THING I DON'T WANT. I'd take anything else (delete my data, lock everything, whatever) over charging me money I can…

"I need to keep an eye every moment of every day for an alarm" You know you can make a machine do that for you - right? In fact all the tools Amazon would use to do this are available to you right now. Cloudwatch, SNS, and Lambda are 98% likely to be all you need - apart from the time to get it set up to do whatever you think is "the right thing".

Well, except if something's gone wrong and my bills are suddenly shooting up, that's exactly the kind of time when some piece of software might misbehave, and fail to freeze everything. And it's not really very easy to test either.

This seems like the kind of thing you really want to get right, and it will be (I imagine) hard to get right. If it was easy, I would expect some company to offer it (along with, of course, a guarantee that if they mess it up, they will pay my bill).

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#414

Post by smarx007 »

Karunamon wrote: post #287
shiftpgdn wrote: post #268

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 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 i…

There are mainly 2 reasons:

* they oversell, so they assume that only small fraction of web servers will consume 100% of resources, while almost every torrent client will consume 100% of the bandwidth. There is nothing wrong with overselling hosting within a reasonable margin, but most of the people here want to run more than a LAMP stack on the server. * they get too much admin overhead replying to Tor "abuse" letters etc., so they just decided to deal with it in the simplest way possible.

I guess both factors contribute equally.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#415

Post by Declanomous »

cowsandmilk wrote: post #367
nullpage wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I have that problem at my current job. The average user is probably 60. Our policy is to tell people that email accounts are free. Our primary concern is that people would recover the password to someone else's account and access data that we only let the other person access.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#416

Post by deelowe »

smarx007 wrote: post #404
deelowe wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He won't reply. He's currently furiously working on integrating his wordpress plugins. Seriously though, Amazon is going after a totally different market than the budget providers.

He is free to use his server how he sees fit. And are you really sure that Amazon is going after a very different market with their 5$/mo. offer than a low-cost VPS provider?

I think comparing a (NVMe?) SSD solution to a HDD one shows the OPs ignorance of the differing market segments each is going after. They aren't comparable solutions.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#417

Post by darkstar999 »

abiox wrote: post #409
IgorPartola wrote: post #141

This is a non-starter without IPv6. I know some of you will be tempted to jump ship from DO and Vultr, but please remember that by doing so you will continue enabling Amazon to hold back progress. While ignoring AWS is not really an option, as it offers some very unique features that are quite useful, this thing does not. DO is not great in this regard as their butcher their allocations, but Vultr gives each VPS a pr…

> enabling Amazon to hold back progress what do you mean?

IP V6 is progress over 4.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#418

Post by bigiain »

CJefferson wrote: post #413
bigiain wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I need to keep an eye every moment of every day for an alarm" You know you can make a machine do that for you - right? In fact all the tools Amazon would use to do this are available to you right now. Cloudwatch, SNS, and Lambda are 98% likely to be all you need - apart from the time to get it set up to do whatever you think is "the right thing".

Well, except if something's gone wrong and my bills are suddenly shooting up, that's exactly the kind of time when some piece of software might misbehave, and fail to freeze everything. And it's not really very easy to test either. This seems like the kind of thing you really want to get right, and it will be (I imagine) hard to get right. If it was easy, I would expect some company to offer it (along with, of course…

Sure - and if you need that, buy that. WHM/Cpanel and Plesk both let you have 100% guaranteed monthly costs with vendor configurable response to over-use of resources. You can get that for $5/month or less - just not from Amazon, because that's not what they sell.

Nobody rings up Caterpillar and complains about the costs of leasing/running/maintaining a D9 'dozer if they're doing jobs that only need a shovel and a wheelbarrow.

Tools for the job. AWS might not be the tool you need. Or might not be the tool you need _yet_.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#419

Post by snowl »

voltagex_ wrote: post #395
kuschku wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And DO is already immensely expensive compared to VPS at OVH, or actual dedicated hardware at Hetzner, OVH, Online.net, Scaleways, KimSufi, however they are all called.

I'm in Australia so I either pay a premium (100x) for an Australian VPS, or deal with 150 (US) to 400ms (EU) latency. I'm "locked out" of Hetzner et al due to that - and yes, I know there's nothing you can do about the speed of light. I just wish Australian/New Zealand/Singaporean/Hong Kong offerings were more competitive (all of those are <200ms)

Have you checked out vultr? I host my VPS there with no issues and extremely good ping.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#420

Post by nodesocket »

I am the only one interested in performance? Do these perform like t2 instances (http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/t2-instan...) which are burstable and capped? What's are the network limits? Are the disks physical or using EBS?

I don't understand why everybody on this thread is complaining about overages? If you use more than the allocated amount you pay overages, simple idea. Why in the world, would you want your server to just shut down when you reach a limit?

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