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Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

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Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#621

Post by vidarh »

ende wrote: post #547
vidarh wrote: post #507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

AWS cuts their prices all the time. Every couple months an email comes out announcing price cuts for S3 or various EC2 instances.

And yet they're still far above most of the alternatives.

E.g. my object storage costs are 1/3 of AWS. My bandwidth costs are 1/50th or so of AWS prices.

There are valid reasons to use AWS depending on what exactly you do, but it's extremely rare for price to be one of them.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#622

Post by Karunamon »

brianmurphy wrote: post #516
Laforet wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

All major IRC networks hide your IP address when you connect now (mode +x), but I bet the perception still exists. Most of these ToS'es are thoughtless copypasta from other services.. every now and then there's a Show HN from a new hosting company that has absurd nonsense in their terms, and the creator gets suitably chastised for it.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#623

Post by vgt »

arcticfox wrote: post #129
blhack wrote: post #112

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…

Hey there, I work on Google Cloud.

Did you set a billing alert? Google BigQuery has proactive "cost controls" that won't let you go overboard, whereas billing alerts are just that - alerts.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#624

Post by computemike »

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 --------…

Since Oct 2014 I've paid $79.90 per month for 16 GB memory, 24 cores, 1 TB hard drive, 128 GB SSD, unmetered i/o, static IP, Windows O/S, on a dedicated physical machine.

I have no idea why people think Amazon pricing is worth it.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#625

Post by wusher87 »

arcticfox wrote: post #129
blhack wrote: post #112

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 actually unlimited liability. Every AWS service has a set of default limits, and you must request AWS raise those limits before you can provision additional resources.

I agree with your larger point, but you're going to be surprised by a $500 bill, not a $500,000 bill.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#626

Post by sn »

dispose13432 wrote: post #323
mjn wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've used it and am happy with it. It's reasonably reliable, but has more downtime than the big providers. I wouldn't run mission-critical software that needs 5 9's uptime on it, but for anything else it's fine, certainly for personal projects. They're transparent with any outages, so you can check up on the outage history on their blog: https://prgmr.com/blog/ It's a small business run by a few people (though it's b…

> in case you want to install a custom OS Do they let you do that? They don't say that in the purchases page. Also, how is uptime relative to vultr?

[Disclaimer: I work at prgmr.com]

You can install a custom OS. But it can be difficult to use an installer we don't provide right now because we only allow serial console access, not VNC. This means most installers won't work out of the box. Worst case you can dd an image to the disk using ssh from the rescue image.

FYI we don't do overage charges right now. For network, if we can't throttle your traffic down then we will shut your service off.

Our blog is a little misleading these days in that for downtime for individual servers, we started emailing customers directly rather than posting to the blog. This is because we want to make sure customers see the downtime notice. We also got confused responses sometimes to the blog wondering whether a given service was affected or not and if we email directly there is no such confusion.

I think our worst case downtime barring about 5 services this year has been the following:

* 0.75 hour network outage, unplanned - 2016-03-16 (gave proportional credit)

* ~2.5 unplanned downtime due to hardware failure requiring new components - 2016-04-03 (gave 15% month credit)

* 2.6 hours downtime from start of maintenance window, planned due to security upgrade - 2016-07-23 (gave proportional credit)

* 2 hours or less downtime, planned due to security upgrade - sometime around 2016-09-01 (gave proportional credit)

* 1.5 hour network outage, unplanned - 2016-09-09 (gave proportional credit)

* 1.3 hour network outage, unplanned - 2016-11-06 (gave proportional credit)

* 2.04 hours downtime from start of maintenance window, planned due to security upgrade - 2016-11-18 (gave proportional credit)

This is a total of up to 12.69 hours downtime over the year so far, assuming downtime started at the beginning of maintenance windows (it usually started after.) Of that 6.05 hours, or less than half, was unplanned.

So far this year there's been about 336 days or 8064 hours. 12.69/8064 is 99.84% uptime overall, which is significantly lower than we would like. For some servers the uptime has so far been significantly better in that there were no hardware failures, one of the security upgrades was unnecessary, and the turnaround time for the remainder of the security upgrades was much faster than for this particular server.

For this particular server, the largest downtime contributors were security upgrades and network outages in that order. For network downtime, we got around to setting up our second upstream but there's a number of single points of failure we should take care of in 2017. There is also some additional scripting we should probably do that would cut down on the network downtime a lot, such as automatically taking down BGP if connectivity beyond the first hop is lost.

For the security update downtime, I think our most realistic bet right now is to get ourselves on the latest version of Xen once it comes out. That will hopefully have a stable implementation (not a technology preview) for live patching.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#627

Post by r5sec5cyl »

zzzcpan wrote: post #114
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 --------…

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?

That's simple. When DO came on the scene it was the only one of its kind. Now there are 4 almost identical services: DO, Linode, Vultr, and Lightsail. On the surface those seem the same because of the near linear pricing and similar allocation of resources. The ones you listed aren't even close. Each of those may have some but they don't have all of what makes the DO model so useful to some of us:

1. Mission-critical/Production ready reliability and communication (all maintenance and issues)

2. No unexpected termination of instances / Reasonable warning & mediation

3. Not overprovisioned / little concern of noisy neighbors

4. Tier 3/4 redundancies

5. Strong American coverage (each DC with Tier 3/4 level services)

6. No setup fee on new instances

7. 1-minute provisioning (simple creation of instances / no ticket needed for deleting resource)

8. Programmatic IaaS management including provisioning, DNS, and images

9. Quality resources - mostly Xeons not ARMs, local SSD not Ceph

10. Huge backing - they're not closing tomorrow & I wanted a #10

While OVH, Hetzner, Leaseweb seem like nice services, particularly for needs in Europe, I can't build an American-centric service on those, set it and forget it nearly as easily or worry-free as with DO/Linode/Vultr/Lightsail.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#628

Post by r5sec5cyl »

chm wrote: post #319
bhouston wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are cores really comparable between DO and Lightsail. Are we sure that 1 core isn't really something not quite a real core but something that is already over allocated based on the assumption of less than 1 core of actual usage? Thus we need to know what the actual over allocation number is to realy figure out if they are comparable.

To me this is what's important. I mainly use VPSs because I'm lazy! I have a bunch of 5$ droplets that I use for development, and even sometimes just to move things around the net more easily... For my particular use case, I don't need to change unless Lightsail offers me a less crowded core. Really, it just seems like AWS is fighting DO on this one, to get a share of their profits. My impression is they're looking f…

That's exactly what makes Lightsail attractive to someone like me. I have production services on AWS and Linode, and I have only positive things to say about Linode, but it would be very nice to manage everything in one place.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#629

Post by r5sec5cyl »

plandis wrote: post #524
eloff wrote: post #491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to mention much less user friendly.

In what way? (I'm legitimately curious to hear about your experience using both products)

You have to learn about and configure their IAM security tools before you can use anything else. Configuring most of the services is NOT straightforward but typically fine-tunable. Lightsail is expected to be different.
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