Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

There is a way to hack this up, which is probably a bit complex for a single instance, but works:

- Setup a HTTPS endpoint on the server that listens for an SNS notification and performs an action (e.g. backup ephemeral data to S3 and shutdown). I wrote the service in Go and the action is just a shell script but choose your favorite language.

- Setup an SNS subscription pointing to the service endpoint.

- Setup an SNS topic for the message.

- Set up an SNS notification in AWS billing. I use "When actual costs are equal to 100% of budgeted amount".

The problem is that it's necessary to lock down the endpoint listener as it will usually need root access in order to shutdown the machine. This can be done by using authentication on the endpoint, setting up a locked down user to run the service under and granting that user the ability to run /sbin/shutdown in the sudoers file.

There are probably nicer ways to do it, but this does work to limit my spend on each instance.

You can also add AWS API calls to delete any other costly related resources (static IPs, load balancers etc.)

I've been thinking about writing a more modular and robust app that handles multiple instances etc but most of my servers are now in GCE so I don't really have the need.

Regarding your question about a paradox, what would qualify to you as "an actual paradox"? What is the definition against which you try a contender? Free free to look it up in a dictionary, but that probably won't help you generate a definition that makes "This statement is false" non-paradoxical. Note also that the etymology of paradox is "beyond strange", so historically the bar for qualifying is simply to be a idea or combination of ideas that is remarkably strange or surprising.

> most sentences are neither true nor false. Nothing interesting has a probability of 0.000 or 1.000.

I'll start by observing that surely you're talking about propositions, not sentences, nor utterances. Or at least you ought to be.

But more significantly, I'll note that most propositions are either true or false (under a given interpretive framework), but that as epistemologically-unprivileged observers, we must assign empirical propositions probabilities that are higher than 0 and lower than 1. Propositions like "I am a fish" or "You hate meat" or "If Rosa hates meat then Alexis is a fish" are either true or false, under any given set of meanings for the constituent words (objects, predicates, etc). I'm curious what probability you think applies to propositions like "2 + 2 = 4" and "All triangles have 3 sides" and "All triangles have less than 11 sides". I think there are very many interesting propositions that differ from these only in degree of complexity (e.g. propositions about whether or not certain code, run on certain hardware, under certain enumerable assumptions about the runtime, will do certain things).

Based on your very strange claim that all interesting sentences have non-zero non-unity probability, perhaps you're saying that you find theorems uninteresting, and moreover are only interested in statements of empirical belief, such as "I put the odds of the sun failing to rise tomorrow lower than one in a billion." In that case, I cannot imagine what statement interest would qualify as a paradox, except perhaps insofar as some empirical statements of belief are "beyond strange".

"This sentence is false" is a paradox under pretty much everyone's notion of a paradox.

I don't disagree with your details, but you're arguing in a circle (here and in another similar comment).

Let's assume, based on the evidence at hand, that Amazon is rolling out Amazon Lightsail, and that as such, they're willing to do work (create business plans and write software) to court the $5/month market. In that case, it's a relevant comment for people to write "I can afford $5/month, or even $20, but I can't afford unlimited liability, even with what I know about AWS customer service, so I cannot use this product." It's relevant because it suggests that there's anxiety that is preventing uptake, which can be solved by a combination of writing software and internally committing themselves to eat the loss if the software is imperfect (as others have said, stopping service actually-on-time is actually harder than it sounds, but the provider can always just eat the loss, invisibly to the seller).

Your (probably-correct) observation that Amazon doesn't really care about the penny-ante user's money (in the short term) is beside the point.

Does this not work as a hard limit for App Engine? [0] It also says here [1] that 'Spending limits are set for paid apps and cannot be exceeded.'

[0] https://cloud.google.com/appengine/pricing#spending_limit

[1] https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/quotas

Why are people comparing CPU Core and Transfers? Come on, this is HN. What CPU, What Speed? KVM / Xen? What SSD? IOPS? etc.

It used to be Linode had the better of everything comparing to DO. Faster CPU even if they are same core count. SSD had much faster IOPS. Less oversold therefore bandwidth were good. And there is no point giving you 100TB transfer per month if you are limited to 10Mbps port speed. Linode ran on shared 40Gbps Port and peak bandwidth were great ( for its price ). Then there is the quality of the Network, ping time between different ISP and Exchanges. Linode has consistently been better then DO. And not it offer double the memory.

But many are worried about Linode's security issues and therefore would not even touch them with a ten foot pole.

I have yet to see quality VPS that offer a whole package better then Linode. Vultr, OVH, Online.net and Scaleway included.

I am hoping Lightsail bring some competition here.