Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

amazonlightsail.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

461–470 of 631 posts

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#461

Post by bigiain »

CJefferson wrote: post #450
bigiain wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wh…

I've been involved in renting heavy equipment, and it doesn't work like Amazon. No one gets unexpected massive bills, you agree before what the bill will be. I don't see the comparison you are trying to make.

Sure - maybe I used a poor example. Apologies.

But.

There's nothing "unexpected" or "unagreed beforehand" about Amazon's pricing or costs either. You order a medium EC2 instance and we all know exactly what the bill per hour will be.

There's nothing unexpected or un agreed beforehand about the ordering/provisioning process. You ask AWS to start one, they'll start one. You tell them to stop it, they'll stop it. You get charged the known agreed upon rate for the hours you run it. You ask for 10, you get 10. There's even checks in place - the first time you ask for 50, you hit a limit which you need to speak to them to get raised before you can get a larger than previously seem bill.

Same with your earthmoving gear. You ring up for prices and they'll say "$200/day for a bobcat, $2500/day for a D9 - includes free delivery in The Bay Area!"

If you need one bobcat for one day at 10 Infinite Loop, Cupertino - and click their web order form and say you want 10 D9s for one day at 1 Infinite Loop, Cupertino (and happily click thru all the never-read the web interface confirmations) - you should 100% expect to get a bill for $25k, as well as dealing with clearing up after parking 10 'dozers in Apple's parking lot.

This is not "unexpected". From the vendor's perspective $25k is not "massive". You knew and agreed to the prices and had every opportunity to calculate what your bill was going to be.

If you were only expecting a $200 bill - that's kinda on you. The earthmoving guy has heaps of other customers who spend many times that every single week - and they all started out as some guy who ordered a $200 bobcat or $25k's work of D9's as a one off. You are just another sale and another prospect in the top of the MRR funnel for him.

(Note: See holidayhole.com for a contemporary example of an unbounded earthmoving bill! ;-) )

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#462

Post by SwellJoe »

It's funny to me that Amazon has looped all the way back around to this, while a bunch of smaller providers who've been doing this for over a decade have been trying to catch up with AWS on all the other fronts. But, realistically, for a lot of users, AWS is a stupidly complex beast just to get a website up and running. I've written a bunch of code that interacts with AWS APIs in two languages, and I still require a couple of hours to spin up anything new there.

But, as others note, the variable cost factor seems to still be a sticking point. I can setup a Digital Ocean droplet, or Linode, or one of a dozen other low-cost VPS providers, for $5 or $10 a month, and I know it will never cost more than that. Maybe I'll bump into memory, disk, or bandwidth limits...but, AWS is a killer if you aren't careful. I used to maintain (and pay for, out of pocket) a non-profit's website on AWS, and the price ballooned while I wasn't paying attention, due to automated backups to S3 and some other stuff, and by the time I noticed was costing me $183/month, for a website that could easily run on a cheap VPS. My fault for not paying closer attention, not setting up cost alerts, etc., but I moved the site off of AWS and onto one of my own web servers, where it literally costs me single digit dollars to run (it has many GBs of email but otherwise is a small site with very low traffic).

So...unless they're giving me some reason to think I won't end up with a massive bill one month because of a popular post, or something, I probably still won't think "I know, I'll use AWS!", unless it's a situation where I need the scaling capabilities of AWS.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#463

Post by neurotech1 »

Someone1234 wrote: post #3

Just to be clear: This service is offered by Amazon/AWS themselves, it isn't a third party. That's a question I had when I first clicked, which is why I am answering it here. One big "gotcha" for AWS newbies which I cannot tell if this addresses: Does this set or allow the user to set a cost ceiling? AWS have offered billing alerts since forever. They'll also occasionally refund unexpected expenses (one time thing).…

These are going to be insanely expensive. Each FPGA chip costs $50k retail, and unlikely to be cheaper than $10k in volume, so I can't imagine the per hour cost being particularly cheap.

https://octopart.com/search?q=VU9P

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#464

Post by Whitestrake »

idm wrote: post #165
zzzcpan wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious, why don't you compare with known "non-cloud" hosting companies too, that provide vps services, like ovh, hetzner, leaseweb, etc.? EDIT: Anyone cares to explain his reasons behind a downvote?

Does anybody care about the answer to your question? In all likelihood, the answer is: because that information is even more work to collect. Your post reminds me of the burden of proof fallacy, in which you create work for other people by asking questions you could easily answer yourself. If you or anybody posts the comparison you requested, it will surely be upvoted.

I don't believe he directly requested a comparison. What he asked was why the commenter above him chose not to. You seem to acknowledge that in your second sentence, but then go on to state that his comment is reminiscent of asking questions one could answer themselves - asking a commenter why they chose (not) to do something doesn't strike me as answerable by a second or third party.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#465

Post by ThrustVectoring »

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 not the pitch. The pitch is that you're making people feel safer about spending money on your platform.

This is one of the fundamental things that make any sort of market work. If it's not safe to participate, people won't.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#466

Post by bigiain »

robotresearcher wrote: post #421
bigiain wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

(Not entirely sure if you're agreeing or disagreeing with me here... ;-) )

So my local Walmart has a Netflix guy who gets 1000 trailers of milk twice a day, and the Dropbox and Yelp guys get a few hundred trailers a week each - and I know these guys from when I see them at the other Walmart in the next town over buying the same sort of amounts there as well. There's people like the Obama campaign who we'd never seen before who fairly quickly ramped up from a gallon a day to a pallet a day, then jumped straight to 50 trailerloads a week for a six months, then stopped buying milk completely one day.

What's considered "normal", "unusual", or "spectacular" - and to whom?

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#467

Post by lwithers »

cheapsteak wrote: post #164
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 closed my VULTR account after getting this email from them ----- Dear Vultr Customer, Including pending charges, your account is carrying a $5.94 balance. In order to cover your current balance and your estimated monthly costs, our billing system will automatically deposit $275.00 from your payment method on file in 24 hours.

They do send out emails like this, however they seem fairly flexible. I have several Vultr instances running, and they're quite happy for me to fund the account as and when if required, and have never automatically charged me.

That said, it is an odd message to send out, and I had my concerns when I first received a similar email. Maybe it's something they should look into altering.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#468

Post by fastest963 »

cheapsteak wrote: post #164
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 closed my VULTR account after getting this email from them ----- Dear Vultr Customer, Including pending charges, your account is carrying a $5.94 balance. In order to cover your current balance and your estimated monthly costs, our billing system will automatically deposit $275.00 from your payment method on file in 24 hours.

Wow, I've never had that happen all the emails I've gotten from them have said they'll automatically deposit $10. Never had anything over $10.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#469

Post by welly »

ajkjk wrote: post #25

I'm amused by the model they have in their banner: a bearded, tattooed man wearing what appears to be a .. cape? We've come a long way since the stock photos of 'smiling super-normal people wearing ties, huddled around a computer'.

And you know for sure that the model is sporting a top knot.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#470

Post by brazzledazzle »

ghaff wrote: post #453
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…

I do suspect that there is a set of circuit breaker actions that could mitigate runaway bills mostly non-destructively. Stop writes to stateful storage. Stop all inbound/outbound data transfers. Terminate EC2 instances (which as you say wold delete data but that would generally be ephemeral data anyway). Halt tasks like EMR. On the other hand, based on near-universal industry practice, there doesn't seem to be a huge…

Do you mean shutdown EC2 instances vs terminate? I believe a shutdown EC2 instance only accrues costs for things like EBS.
Post reply on HN