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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

#431

Post by numlocked »

zenlikethat wrote: post #380
zwischenzug wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until you get successful and Amazon copy your implementation.

It'd definitely be a gamble, but imagine pitching this idea at Amazon HQ. "We're going to roll out a fantastic new project to allow our customers to spend fewer dollars on our platform!" Not saying Jevon's Paradox wouldn't kick in, but the friction of convincing businesses to work on tools to allow their customers to spend _less_ money is high.

That's really not true at Amazon. It's deep in their core values to cut customer expenses whenever possible, regardless of competitive pressures. I can't explain why they don't offer this feature, but I doubt it's because anyone is scared of a feature that could potentially help customers.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#432

Post by Laforet »

smarx007 wrote: post #414
Karunamon wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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" lette…

Most VPS providers already limit the options to run Tor nodes or SMTP servers in one way or another. However forbidding things like IRC and audio streaming is quite unusual and I wonder how oversubscribed their bandwidth must be on these hosts.

I doubt CPU or RAM allocation is the issue here given AWS already have a good CPU time credit system to manage it.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#434

Post by e2021 »

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)

Digital ocean have servers in Singapore for the same price as all their other ones. The latency from Perth is about 40ms from memory.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#435

Post by blibble »

biot wrote: post #376
blibble wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is why people set up companies, which in the UK costs 13 pounds/year to keep operational limited liability, can't really beat it

Intentionally doing that in order to avoid paying sounds a lot like fraud, something your limited liability won't protect you from.

shifting risk to the creditors is the entire point of limited liability; the risk of deadbeats abusing it is always there, and the ability to pay is something almost every business will take into account when arranging a line of credit

amazon could completely negate this risk by requiring pre-payment for small/unknown operators, which is something a lot of people (myself included) desperately want them to provide.

I'm sure they've done their sums here, and have figured out the increased revenue from customers not being able to set a budget is more than their potential losses from deadbeats

the variable costs are basically zero, after all ( bandwidth and CPU time are worthless if not utilised)

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#436

Post by mwcampbell »

adamkittelson wrote: post #202
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've been using packet.net for a small side project, they do bare metal / single tenant servers but the provisioning is very similar to linode/digital ocean. Their ~$35/mo ($0.05/hr) option is on par with digital ocean's $80/mo offering.

Plus 5 cents per GB of outgoing transfer.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#437

Post by __jal »

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…

Yep.

I had a personal $400 learning experience with Amazon. They did refund it. My last company had a low-5-figure surprise a few years ago. Some of that could be considered their fault (alerts were sent to someone on vacation), but again, the refusal to allow the option of a "hit a limit, pull the plug" option is what causes this.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#438

Post by MustardTiger »

JustSomeNobody wrote: post #78
ffk wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I personally don't use AWS for personal projects because of the lack of a cap. I would rather see my system suspended rather than continue to pay beyond my budget.

This. I got excited about this until I came to HN and started reading the comments. I _have_ to have a cap. I don't want to do something stupid that puts me on the hook for $$$.

So who are you using then? I don't see anyone that has a cap. Everyone charges you if you go over your allotted bandwidth.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#439

Post by jsamuel »

Confirmed that LightSail works with ServerPilot (https://serverpilot.io/).

LightSail's default firewall opens ports 22 (SSH) and 80 (HTTP) but has 443 (HTTPS) closed. That seems like a terrible default for making a developer-friendly service. Hopefully they fix that and open 443 by default. Otherwise, a lot of wasted time is going to be spent by developers who have configured SSL on their sites and don't know why it isn't working.

LightSail feels very similar to DreamCompute that DreamHost launched, including the approach of only allowing SSH public key auth without any option of using password auth. So, they're intentionally leaving out some users with that approach.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#440

Post by ris »

user5994461 wrote: post #338
manacit wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As @STRML said, the difference is that Amazon is using network attached (EBS) storage as the primary instance storage, instead of local SSD. This provides a ton of benefit to Amazon, and some benefit for the user as well: CoW backend allows for nearly instant snapshots and clones, multi server/rack redundancy with EC, ability to scale up with provisioned IOPS easily, etc. The downside is that the access methods for b…

> CoW backend allows for nearly instant snapshots and clones LOL => A 80GB EBS SSD snapshot takes more than 1 hour. Subsequent snapshots are incremental and will be less slow. > multi server/rack redundancy with EC You can move drive manually after you stop an instance, if that's what you call redundancy. > ability to scale up with provisioned IOPS Nope. You need to unmount, clone the existing EBS volume to a new EBS…

> Subsequent snapshots are incremental and will be less slow.

Depends how much they've been written to since last snapshot. Heavy writes and it can be just as slow again.

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