Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS • Hacker News Board

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#511

Post by vidarh » Thu, Dec 01, 2016, 4:52 AM UTC

geofft wrote: post #396

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…

> Should EC2 instances be terminated (which deletes all data on them) You know exactly how much a paused EC2 instance charges you. The ceiling implementation could say, if the total amount charged so far this month, plus the cost of pausing the instance for the rest of the month, exceeds the ceiling, pause it now. So there's no data loss; the worst case is the customer's service is offline for the remainder of the mo…

Even a serious production user would generally have some threshold above which continuing and hoping AWS forgives the bill puts the company at greater risk than suspending service.

Granted, for a big company, that amount may be so big it's unrealistic to ever hit it.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#512

Post by tedmiston » Thu, Dec 01, 2016, 4:57 AM UTC

cpollard0 wrote: post #214

setq wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're capped at 20 instances as well by the looks. Plus you'll get AWS 'dog shit' support included which is hopeless. Will stick with Linode.

They put the caps on to help with the very problem you are all bitching about; provisioning a ton of resources and getting a big bill. It's very easy to raise the cap.

The main purpose of AWS's cap is to prevent abuse.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

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Post by vidarh » Thu, Dec 01, 2016, 5:01 AM UTC

jopsen wrote: post #508

arcticfox wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I can't stand it. It's unlimited liability for anyone that uses their service with no way to limit it. 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 a…

But even the default limits are high enough that there are plenty of companies that could at least in theory bankrupt themselves with it. Especially because there is no hard total cap, and so many services have high enough limits that you can get really nasty shocks if any one of them is maxed out. Even more so if you e.g. make use of different instance types (separate limits) in different regions (separate limits) and a wide range of services (separate limits).

And I've done work for clients that have requested really big increases because of both realistic and unrealistic expectations of handling traffic peaks. E.g. one client asked for an increase to 100 instances of 2-3 different types in a few regions to be prepared to handle a couple of days of high traffic. If said event had happened, they scaled it all up, and somehow didn't take them down again, it'd only take a few days of charges for them to be insolvent at their then-current funding level.

So you're right, there are limits, but limits or not doesn't matter if it's high enough that it can make you go out of business.

Which makes me wonder if anyone has ever gone out of business because AWS was unwilling to forgive a "surprise" bill. I'd be inclined to assume that they're willing to stretch quite far to avoid that, given that they seem to be very good about it. But I'd also not want to stake my business on hoping Amazon will be charitable about something like that.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

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Post by zenlikethat » Thu, Dec 01, 2016, 5:09 AM UTC

ThrustVectoring wrote: post #465

zenlikethat wrote: post #380

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 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.

That's what the existing resource limits are for. AWS wants the customers for whom $1000 is a rounding error first and foremost. The DO-style $5-$500 / month customer is gravy on top and probably a future upsell.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

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Post by zenlikethat » Thu, Dec 01, 2016, 5:12 AM UTC

vidarh wrote: post #507

numlocked wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If that was true for AWS, their prices would be far lower pretty much across the board. 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 pl…

It is cheap compared to setting up and running your own datacenter, S3 replacement, etc. You have to keep in mind that that's where the story started and continues to be, a lot of folks (the ones with $$$) see it as "no cloud vs cloud" not "DigitalOcean vs. Amazon".

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

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Post by brianmurphy » Thu, Dec 01, 2016, 5:16 AM UTC

Laforet wrote: post #432

smarx007 wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In the old days (90s-2000s), allowing IRC bots opened yourself to being a DoS target and general receiver of harassment complaints from perceived social abuses that happened in the chat rooms. I assume things haven't changed that much.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

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Post by swuecho » Thu, Dec 01, 2016, 5:17 AM UTC

nik736 wrote: post #250

Guest98123 wrote: post #207

Let me get this straight, right now AWS is billing me $270/mo for 3TB of bandwidth on my autoscaling web servers. With LightSail, I can get that same bandwidth, plus storage and instances for $15/mo? In total, I'm spending about $15,000/yr on AWS, and someone spending $5/mo gets their bandwidth 18x cheaper than me? Shouldn't it be the other way around, and I should be the one with the discount? I get enough headaches…

They want to destroy DigitalOcean, so they have to match their pricing. Additional traffic is also $0,09 / GB with Lightsail.

I do not think they can. I am happy with Digital Ocean almost 3 years. Did not have any problem and pretty happy with it.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

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Post by josh_carterPDX » Thu, Dec 01, 2016, 5:19 AM UTC

Seems like a play to compete with Digital Ocean.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#519

Post by Johnny555 » Thu, Dec 01, 2016, 5:19 AM UTC

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.

If you leave it parked in a pit overnight that fills with water, you may find yourself on the hook for a big bill if your insurance finds you negligent. Likewise, if you neglect to perform required maintenance, you could find yourself on the hook for an expensive engine overhaul.

Even heavy equipment rentals can result in large unexpected bills if you don't pay attention to what you're doing.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#520

Post by zenlikethat » Thu, Dec 01, 2016, 5:20 AM UTC

paulsutter wrote: post #494

zenlikethat wrote: post #380

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.

I'm always fascinated when someone mentions a paradox so I looked up "Jevon's Paradox". The real economic term for this is elastic demand (specifically, relatively elastic demand). For example, microprocessor cost reductions make new applications possible, thus demand increased so much that the total amount spent on microprocessors went up for decades. Example of inelastic demand is radial tires. They last four times…

Are you sure?

Jevons's Paradox is about demand increasing for a resource when it becomes more efficient to use, e.g., someone invents an engine which can go twice as far with the same amount of fuel but instead of halving the demand for fuel the demand actually increases.

If I recall, elasticity of demand has to do with the relationship to supply. A very inelastic demand will cause people to consume the same rate no matter how much _supply_ is available. It doesn't have to do with the efficiency at which the resource is consumed like stated above. It's a subtle difference but I think they're actually quite distinct concepts.

Actual paradoxes are common. Just consider the classic: "This sentence is false".