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Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

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531–540 of 631 posts

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#531

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it comes down to them seeing themselves as a utility. You wouldn't want to be prompted for payment confirmation every time you plug something into an outlet, but this does mean that you'll have a huge unexpected charge if you accidentally leave on the air conditioner when you go on vacation.

I think part of the reason that utilities can get away with this is the fact that the maximum bill you are likely to run up is generally 2x-3x your normal bill. This doesn't well for Amazon because your actual bill can be orders of magnitude larger than what you expect.

And every now and then a utility bill makes the news because someone's water line sprung a leak and they used $5000 worth of water in a month.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#532
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post #406

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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 and service by service throttling. Which Amazon has. 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 li…

Why don't those startups use something like cloudflare? It would stink to be at the mercy of the good graces of ddos purveyors to not attack.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#533
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post #112

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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…

Similar thing here (except I was trying to be more paranoid). Tested out the free tier of Amazon, but didn't realize spinning down and spinning up would ding me if they were within an hour. Even know, when I use it for testing and I'm being fairly careful, I'll get a $3 bill at the end of the month. I was trying to set up alerts, but their alerts and dashboard, while I'm sure super capable, is a bit overwhelming as a…

$3! :)

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#534

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).…

Linode provides 2 gb for $10. AWS provides 1GB for the same thing. Also, AWS does not support ipv6 which means you can not launch your apps in istore if you use AWS servers.

> AWS does not support ipv6

Wait what? That's getting ridiculous. Seven years ago they would have been on time, perhaps even considered early by some, but three years ago when looking for hosting providers I already laughed at the ones without v6 and moved on without a second thought. They weren't even the cheap ones.

Currently enjoying a €3/mo VPS at Pcextreme.nl with the same specs as the $5 Lightsail VPS. But with IPv6 of course.

Perhaps I've been spoiled with dual stack at home since 2009 from xs4all. Other Dutch ISPs promised it in (iirc) 2013 and every year since, but there has yet to be a second big one to offer it and other countries like Belgium surpassed us by now. Even Germany's Telekom is getting there.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#535

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you use a CDN? If no. You should use a CDN.

I use a CDN for js/css/fonts/images, but the $270/mo is the bandwidth for the gzipped HTML going out from the web servers.

This made me think of a thing I've done in the past so here's a brain vomit about 'base page caching' - most of which is probably irrelevant here but perhaps someone will find it useful:

I don't know how dynamic or unique your pages are to each user or if they're largely ubiquitous across all users.

Assuming the latter I know that you can cache a base page in some CDN's through a different header. Akamai's DSA product in particular allows you to cache HTML using the Edge-Control header that has matching syntax to Cache-Control. Edge-Control is stripped out in transit, the client never sees it. This allows you to control cache TTL in Akamai's edge servers independently of the client side cache.

A quick look through Amazon Cloudfront docs seems to indicate that Cloudfront cache's will respect the Cache-Control header but this can get complicated if you don't want the same TTL within client side browser cache. Perhaps I missed something, though?

Even if your page is dynamic but you're willing to go a route like Angular or ReactJS polymorphic client side apps you can still offload a bunch of those basepage requests assuming your app is suitable for this kind of design pattern. The assumption is that you will be relying on API's so additional complicated caching calculations may apply ;)

Depending on how you construct your cache key you can do a certain amount of multi-variate caching and still achieve pleasant cache hit rates. This applies to both base pages and fronting API's with a CDN.

Regardless it looks like for only U.S. traffic (as a yardstick) Cloudfront charges 0.085 per GB so futzing with the AWS calculator I split a page I'm very familiar with (49KB) across your 3TB for US only traffic and the price comes to $304.68. No savings.

Looking around I see that Fastly (a lower priced than Akamai - Varnish based CDN) charges a $0.12 rate, the price there in the same scenario would be something like $400 (the number of http requests made factor into some of these pricing models.) Akamai comes in at $500.

OTOH a CDN I've never used (Stackpath) might cost only $140 which would get you close to half your current spend. Remember that depending on your cache hit/miss ration and how many cache flushes (cache object invalidation) that price could be anywhere from slightly to extremely optimistic as you still have to pay for the requests between your CDN edge servers and your AWS origin.

To be fair, when considering pricing Akamai is the big fish here and has something on the order of 170,000 edge servers sprinkled all over the world whereas some of these smaller CDN's have far far fewer.

Once you're into some CDN's there's all sorts of wonky things you can do with parent-child tiering models that can be leveraged to further limit the number of times a call is made back to your origin (aws) server.

Here's a pretty good CDN pricing calculator: http://www.cdncalc.com/

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ge…

The problem isn't starting up 250 servers.

The problem is someone putting up your hobby website on reddit when it's 2 in the morning your time, and you wake up the next day with a $10,000 bill.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Actually a good comparison -- if reddit users came around and smashed up the equipment, I would be OK as I would have insurance.

I need "reddit / DDos insurance"

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#538
post #406

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…

Plenty of teams will want this for dev/test.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes I'm sure. When coal becomes cheaper as a fuel (efficiency being one path), if that opens up new applications or use by a broader set of customers, it's no surprise at all that total revenue could go up.

As for your example, most sentences are neither true nor false. Nothing interesting has a probability of 0.000 or 1.000.

"This sentence is false" is clever use of language, may be interesting to sophomore philosophy students while smoking weed, but its not useful and there's nothing paradoxical about it.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#540
post #480
post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you will be automatically charged 500% of your regular usage You are not being "charged" per se. The amount is transferred to your account and is there as credit until you spend it. Sorry for nitpicking, but it is important point.

I'm going to nitpick in reverse. You are being _charged_ - This is a charge against your card - They are not a bank, so the money in your "account" with them is just an unsecured, general liability to you. If they go bust, they owe you money but you will never see it. - If you want to withdraw that money from your "account" and they refuse, then your options are pretty limited. Once they take it from your payment met…

I am not disagreeing with what you say, but "charged" as it was used in the GP comment, it might have lead someone to believe that VULTR charge for usage per month.
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