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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

#421

Post by robotresearcher »

bigiain wrote: post #412
tomc1985 wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fe…

In the course of using Walmart in a fairly normal way to buy a gallon or two, I make a teeny mistake and take home 15 trailers of milk and they charge me full price for it.

If only Walmart would have a process in place to notice that I was ordering a spectacular and unusual amount of milk and save us all the trouble.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#422

Post by nodesocket »

mbrookes wrote: post #221
msh wrote: post #199

Strange, I can't seem to find the price of bandwidth when you exceed the included 1 TB.

$0.09/ GB ($90/TB). Good luck if you host a service which then gets HN or Reddit hugged!

I've been on the front page of HN multiple times, you won't even come close to the $5 limit of 1 TB. This is ridiculous.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#423

Post by nodesocket »

ngrilly wrote: post #184

Very smart move from Amazon. The main advantage of Amazon LightSail over DigitalOcean are: built-in firewall (instead of messing with iptables), managed database with AWS RDS, and using S3 with a low latency and no networking cost.

DigitalOcean must implement a centralized firewall. This is the missing piece for them.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#424

Post by olegkikin »

deelowe wrote: post #385
imdsm wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

WTF? I never did anything with wordpress plugins in my life. And even if I did, so what? You have some elitism / insecurity issues.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#425

Post by nodesocket »

I just created two 512MB Ubuntu instances and here are my thoughts. (+ indicates positive, - indicates negative, ? question)

    + You can use private networking for cross-instance communication.
    + You can even communicate with other AWS services by using VPC peering.
    + Hourly billing.
    - The firewall rules are not shared. You can't create a single rule and attach to multiple instances.
    ? What are the network throughput caps? Can't find it anywhere?
    ? Are the disk physical or using EBS?
    ? Can you snapshot a running instance, or does it have to stopped?

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#426

Post by finnh »

Hello71 wrote: post #135

The FAQ is extremely unclear, but if I'm understanding it right, doesn't this make transfer out to Internet significantly cheaper if you insist on using AWS? Instead of paying $0.09/GB, transfer to Lightsail for $0.02/GB then transfer out for $5/1000 GB=$0.005/GB. You do have to deal with changing IP, but you get a 1.26 order of magnitude decrease in price, and that's assuming you don't bother actually using the extr…

The "transfer to Lightsail" step (from another AWS resource) is free, as long as you use the private IP.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#427

Post by ilaksh »

If you read the fine print, the price and performance isn't actually as good as Digital Ocean and a few other similar services, so unless you actually are using AWS services AND need your VM to be in the same VPC or data center as the services, then it doesn't make sense.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#428

Post by TheSmiddy »

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?

We're running out of IPv4 addresses and need to move to 100% IPv6 ASAP or else we're going to end up with a system where it's NAT all the way down.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#429

Post by chx »

bhntr3 wrote: post #406
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 seems like a hard technical problem to shut down gracefully. But it's an easy product problem. Just suspend the account. AWS must do this already for some cases. No one running a real business on AWS wants a hard ceiling instead of billing alerts and service by service throttling. Which Amazon has. So, this is just the nuclear option for people's pet projects. It's not a bad thing to have but I wouldn't expect it…

> No one running a real business on AWS wants a hard ceiling instead of billing alerts

Are you sure? I'd imagine many startups would rather take a few hours of downtime over billed thousands erroneously. The latter could easily mean the end of the company but the former, when you are just striking out is not the end of the world by far.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#430

Post by ris »

SXX wrote: post #313
kuschku wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's must be said Hetzner have much cheaper offers on their auction: https://robot.your-server.de/order/market There also have no setup cost for these dedicated servers.

They're also worryingly keen on non-ECC machines at the low end though
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