501–510 of 631 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh give me a break man. Starvation and homelessness. Deleting customers data is something you don't do. If they can't pay you can write off the bill. But people have committed suicides because of data loss. The parent post nailed it.
If you're going to commit suicide if you lose your data, perhaps you shouldn't rely on the graciousness of a third party to save your data for free.
Keep in mind if you are a current EC2 customer and are excited about a cheaper VPS in your region, the VPSs are only available in Virginia. I was pretty excited about a cheaper VPS I could provision in the Sydney area, but these are restricted to a single datacenter.
Damn! I got excited at the prospects of cheap VPSes in Sydney :(
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.
I've never been charged on vultr, as I use bitcoin to always pay my bills (which is push only). I think they have stopped accepting that for new customers due to abuse though, which is quite a shame (but understandable).
A compelling product. The dashboard looks great. They even replaced the confusing term "user data" with "launch script", but they fall back into it later. SSH in-browser is great too and can be bookmarked/opened in a fullscreen tab. Uploading (instead of pasting) your SSH pubkey is a bit annoying. The docs appear to say you can add these to a VPC but I don't see how to do it. They don't say the SSD storage is local,…
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…
Also how our are analogies alike? Milk is a consumable, data is information. Completely different usage pattern.
Finally, every internet service provider I've ever used that held data for some reason granted me a grace period, even if it was never officially stated. Sometimes you just have to ask nicely
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
One of the most amazing feats Amazon has pulled off is to convince people that AWS is cheap. They're cheap in the way that Apple are: Only if you need a feature-set (or name recognition..) that excludes the vast majority of the competitors from consideration. If/when you truly need that, then they're the right choice. There are plenty of valid reason to pick AWS.
But they're very rarely the cheap choice.
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…
It's not unlimited liability, most of their services have limits imposed. If you've scaled any service to thousands of machines you'll quickly find out that they stop you at 20-30 machines or so. Then you have to contact support to get the limit increased.
Sure you can still rake up an unpleasant bill. But there are limits :)
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…
I know startups that I could bankrupt with a few lines of code and a ~$60 server somewhere long before they'd be able to react to a billing alert if it wasn't for AWS being reasonably good about forgiving unexpected costs.
I'm not so sure no one running a "real business" would like a harder ceiling to avoid being at the mercy of how charitable AWS feels in those kinds of situations, or when a developer messes up a loop condition, or similar.
Perhaps not a 100% "stop everything costing money" option that'd involve deleting everything, but yes, some risks are existential enough that you want someone to figuratively pull the power plug out of your server on a seconds notice if you have the option.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Plenty of companies operate like that, and e.g. require purchase order ids and accompanying maximum spends issued for any expense over X, where X can be very low. I've worked for companies where it was 0 - every expense, no matter how low, needed prior approval from the CEO or finance director. Not just tiny companies either - one of the strictest such policies I've dealt with was with a company of more than a hundred employees.