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Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS
- jakozaur 10y agoJust announced on AWS Reinvent Keynote. It's nicely packaged their existing products (EC2, VPC, ...). So you can get Digital Ocean like experience on AWS. You can still tune the underlying services.
- dragthor 10y agoDigital Ocean was the first thing that I thought.
- yossarianium 10y agoI suspect that it may have been the first thing that Amazon was thinking about while building this too ...
- acejam 10y agoIt's already too expensive compared to DigitalOcean and Linode. An $80/month instance only gives you 2 CPU cores. For the same money you can get 4 @ DigitalOcean and 6 @ Linode.
- dx034 10y agoStill don't understand why people use $80 vps. You can get at least 2 dedicated servers with each way more performance for that. Vps make sense if you need low performance or quick resizing, but I doubt that's what most $80 instances are used for. Don't see how they make sense financially..
- Someone1234 10y agoJust 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). But they've never offered a hard "suspend my account" ceiling that a lot of people with limited budgets have asked for. They claim this is a competitor for Digital Ocean, but with DO what they say they charge is what they actually charge. I'm already seeing looking through the FAQ various ways for this to exceed the supposed monthly charges listed on the homepage (and no way to stop that). Why even offer a service like this if you cannot GUARANTEE that the $5 they say they charge is all you'll ever get charged? How is this different from AWS if a $5 VPS can cost $50, or $500? That's what Amazon is missing. People want ironclad guarantees about how much this can cost under any and all circumstances. I'd welcome an account suspend instead of bill shock.
- elevensies 10y agoOn the landing page they say there will be overages for excess data transfer. In terms of how it is different, I think a lot of people here have probably been using AWS for 5+ years and the jargon etc. is familiar, and we can calculate the price and understand what it is, but for people who are just getting started this will be a product that is directly comparable to i.e. Digital Ocean and can serve as a gateway drug to AWS.
- AtheistOfFail 10y agoThat's how they get people on Glacier storage. The storage is cheap as balls but the transfer can fuck you.
- bradyd 10y agoThey changed the way Glacier retrieval costs work a little over a week ago to help address this. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10230937 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10230937
- jknoepfler 10y agoThe whole point is to service customers with massive storage needs who seldom need to retrieve the data. For example, many companies are compelled by regulation to archive records for decades, but only need to access data in response to lawsuits/etc. no one with frequent high volume retrieval needs would be advised to use glacier.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- wildpeaks 10y agoExactly, the lack of cost ceiling is the #1 reason I can't pick AWS.
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- sheraz 10y agoI have a growing list of cloud / vps providers I like to kick the tires on. I'll be adding this to the list as well.
- avg_dev 10y agoCare to post your list? After it was filled out with details it'd be a nice resource to share.
- jjawssd 10y agoWhat are your thoughts on Vultr?
- alyandon 10y agoI maintain VPS across different providers (Linode, DO, vultr, budgetvm, etc) and haven't had any real issues with them. Based on my interactions with their customer support, the level of support you receive is about what you'd should reasonably expect from providers in that price category. The only real gripe that I have is that they don't statically route the /64 they assign to your VPS so I have to run a ndp proxy daemon.
- vlucas 10y agoI had both Vultr and RAMNode servers, but shut them both down and moved them to DigitalOcean. The control panels in Vultr seem like 3rd party reseller ones akin to the cPanel/WHM days. I was not able to upgrade my Vultr VPS to a larger one with a few clicks like I expected to be able to (and am able to on DO and Linode). I guess you are expected to put in a support ticket or something. It felt very much like a basic Xen setup, though they have made recent strides to help with that. With DigitalOcean, I can upgrade my VPS with a few clicks, and even downgrade them as well if the storage disk is not expanded when you upgrade. I am very impressed with their offerings, and the ease of use of their control panel setup.
- Kephael 10y agoI colocated with a sister company of theirs for a year and a half and I found them to be very reliable. Vultr provides free DDoS protection in their piscataway location but if you do not require that I don't see a reason to use them.
- kohanz 10y agoHow much of a threat is this to Digital Ocean, Linode, and others?
- 2bluesc 10y agoLooks like a direct threat to me. I'm sure DO will have better support though, but AWS will have a much more potent upgrade path for start-ups as they mature.
- ropiku 10y agoLinode still gives you more RAM for the same $. But it does feel like a serious threat to them, Amazon can use their size to outcompete them.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- KayL 10y agoCustomers (non-tech guys) trust Amazon more than others.
- harryh 10y agoTech guys too. Linode is a joke and Digital Ocean isn't a whole lot better. I wouldn't trust either one to host a serious business.
- scosman 10y agoThis is the first cheap bandwidth option I've seen on AWS. Transferring 1TB out of S3 or EC2 is costs about $90, but is included in a $5 server with Lightsail.
- reacharavindh 10y agoLooks like you can spin up three of these instances as a proxy and pay $15 for 3 TB of bandwidth from AWS.
- sheraz 10y agoIs the transfer from the aws instances to the lightsail instances not billed if in the save data center?
- geostyx 10y agoTransfer to and from other AWS resources is free (see their FAQ).
- hanoz 10y agoI'm not seeing that in the FAQ. In my reading it pointedly leaves open the possibility of incurring AWS egress charges when transferring to LightSail.
- merb 10y agohttps://aws.amazon.com/de/blogs/aws/amazon-lightsail-the-power-of-aws-the-simplicity-of-a-vps/ https://aws.amazon.com/de/blogs/aws/amazon-lightsail-the-pow... - VPC peering. Which means it's free since transfering data from one VPC to another one or peering is free (at least it was with bare aws)
- scosman 10y agoYeah, but max 20 Lightsail servers per month. No big clients will be able to use this to export/leave.
- stephanheijl 10y agoI could see the appeal of some of the lower range hardware plans, but especially the higher tiers seem way off in terms of pricing. Can someone clarify why a 2 core/8GB machine costs 80$, where other IaaS providers charge far less for such rigs? (DigitalOcean gets you 4 cores for 80$/m, TransIP gets you 4 cores, 8GB and 300GB SSD for <55$/m...)
- Veen 10y agoSpeculation, but DO may be overselling their servers at a higher rate than AWS. I know for a fact that lots of other VPS providers do this.
- k2enemy 10y agoI'd love to give this a try for my mail server that is currently hosted on Linode. Half the price would be great. Does anyone have experience with how "clean" the AWS IP addresses are? I'd hate to switch to Lightsail and have to deal with deliverability and spam blacklist issues. I've been fortunate to have had zero issues on Linode.
- rajeemcariazo 10y agoI think your IP address issue can be an issue to any hosting provider. I have experienced that issue with a VPS from SiteGround. May I know what mail server do you install on Linode server?
- k2enemy 10y agopostfix with dovecot, dspam, and postgrey
- zrail 10y agoI just ran a few of my IP's through http://www.anti-abuse.org/multi-rbl-check/ http://www.anti-abuse.org/multi-rbl-check/ and didn't get any hits. It's likely luck of the draw. That said, you have to ask them to remove their port 25 throttle and set rDNS: https://aws.amazon.com/forms/ec2-email-limit-rdns-request https://aws.amazon.com/forms/ec2-email-limit-rdns-request
- blairbeckwith 10y agoReally wanted to get more information on this, but all of their Docs links currently 404.
- jqueryin 10y agoMy guess is Amazon wants to rope people into their ecosystem, and they've recognized that many startups have opted for the cheaper VPS providers in their bootstrap days. This is an intriguing move and one that I'm sure DigitalOcean, Linode, and Vultr have been fearing may happen. The pricing is on par with these alternatives in the VPS space.
- slig 10y ago> The pricing is on par with these alternatives in the VPS space. Linode offers the double of the RAM for the same price for $10, $20 and $40 VPSs.
- Someone1234 10y agoA lot of people, myself included, don't seriously consider Linode anymore given their security problems (March 2012, 2013) and infrastructure problems (Dec-Jan 2015-16).
- dictum 10y agoDigital Ocean's pricing has remained the same since 2013. It'd be nice if they bumped the $20 plan to 3GB RAM (or go full Linode at 4GB)
- amq 10y agoI wish: $20 4GB RAM 2 CPUs $40 8GB RAM 4 CPUs Some VPS providers already have similar offerings.
- hbosch 10y agoI hate to deviate from the topic, but... is the guy on the front page wearing a red cape?
- heywire 10y agoAre you saying you don't wear a superhero outfit when you're coding??
- beat 10y agoI wear a supervillain outfit. Goatee, white lab coat, menacing laugh.
- devopsproject 10y agoHe is a ninja rock star hacker.
- Mindless2112 10y agoSure, after all, it is the "hero" image [1][2]. [1] https://amazonlightsail.com/images/hero/index-6316203d.jpg https://amazonlightsail.com/images/hero/index-6316203d.jpg [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hero_image https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hero_image
- anilshanbhag 10y agoHere is a comparison of $20 instances across DO, Linode and LightSail All have 3TB transfer Linode(Best): 4GB RAM, 2 Core, 48 GB SSD DO: 2GB RAM, 2 Core, 40 GB SSD LightSail(Worst): 2GB RAM, 1 Core, 40 GB SSD I use this exact instance on Linode for my site https://dictanote.co; https://dictanote.co; that one extra core makes a lot of difference when you want to take a backup of db or something intensive like that.
- blinkingled 10y agoYeah the LightSail pricing doesn't look attractive at all. $40 if you need to get 2 cores - and dual core really should help with anything non-trivial.
- anilshanbhag 10y agoI was hoping their pricing is competitive at least if not better given they are so late to this I just need one VPS market.
- jethro_tell 10y agoIsn't that what ec2 was 10 years ago?
- bryanlarsen 10y agoAll low-end VPS offerings use shared cores, so # of cores is a fairly useless comparison unless they also tell you the oversubscription rate or all of your neighbors are idle.
- dotancohen 10y agoI don't know about the others, but on AWS with the T2.* instances it always seems like I've got the server to myself. They are either well provisioned, or well managed. The burstable CPUs are great.
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- staked 10y agoThis is certainly more in my price range for personal stuff (family sites, etc). Definitely going to take advantage of the free 30 days to kick the tires. Curious to see what sort of server monitoring is included.
- dfrey 10y agoI guess this service might prevent people from migrating off Amazon services to DigitalOcean (or other VPS providers), but I don't really see a compelling reason to use this service instead of DigitalOcean.
- manacit 10y agoI think this could quickly change in the 6 month to 1 year horizon as Amazon (potentially) adds onto this product with other AWS services built into this product. Imagine if you could easily spin up DB instances and create LBs within LightSail - they would offer more features than DigitalOcean (or any other "VPS Provider"), while being price and usability competitive. I would definitely be nervous if I was DigitalOcean - there are still advantages (support, tutorials, etc), but this closed the gap significantly.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- ajkjk 10y agoI'm amused by the model they have in their banner: a bearded, tattooed man wearing what appears to be a .. cape? We've come a long way since the stock photos of 'smiling super-normal people wearing ties, huddled around a computer'.
- vinay427 10y agoNot to mention the man is wearing on-ear headphones and is using a smartphone in front of his laptop, which seems more common today than ever.
- RUG3Y 10y agoDo on-ear headphones carry a negative connotation? I wear them because earbuds make my ears hurt after a while.
- infinitone 10y agoIts all about the over-ear mate.. over-ear..
- RUG3Y 10y agoHaha ok...I guess technically I'm wearing "over-ear" headphones right now. Hyper-X...pretty cheap gaming headset, extremely comfortable, no flashing led lights or other weird gamer features. Decent sound too.
- phillmv 10y agoIt just dumps you into a revamped, less intimidating AWS console so I wouldn't be too concerned about this for now. The thing that keeps me away from AWS services is the depth of the service - I need to be an expert in AWS on top of knowing how to configure my servers, which for now is maybe a non starter. It does show you the power of packaging: with a simple domain and thrown together marketing page, you too can target another market segment.
- tomschlick 10y agoAny word on if this includes IPv6 addresses?
- xfalcox 10y agoNo IPV6
- desireco42 10y agoI meant to say that it was about time someone comes up with something like this, but seems that in the details AWS complexity can still bite you. Is there a service, that you know of, that would simplify AWS so that we can just use it with predictable expenses and ability to grow? Maybe I am asking for too much.
- fooey 10y agoHeroku? They've basically just a usability shell on top of AWS.
- Veen 10y agoI think a million VPS hosting companies just cried out in terror. The major reason to use a VPS host instead of AWS is that AWS is complicated. This seems to be just as simple as DO or a million other VPS hosts, with the added benefit that it's easy to hook up to Amazon's other services if you need to.
- regularfry 10y agoSmaller hosts will make a decent margin on managed services. That's just not a game Amazon want to get into.
- ghaff 10y agoThere's a lot of managed services on AWS and it's growing rapidly. But they're delivered through partners, not AWS directly. I didn't write down the numbers from this segment of the Re:Invent Global Partner keynote yesterday but, as I recall, "next generation managed service providers" was highlighted as a big growth opportunity.
- antisthenes 10y agoI think the point was that Amazon's customer service is awful, compared to smaller, much more nimble companies where you can get a technical person on the line and get much more personalized service from someone in the US.
- kuschku 10y ago> The major reason to use a VPS host instead of AWS is that AWS is complicated. The major reason to use a VPS host instead of AWS is the order of magnitude price difference. That’s not going away with LightSail either. Look at all the French/German/Dutch hosters, they’re 10-20 times cheaper than AWS, and you get far better storage performance and cheaper traffic.
- dx034 10y agoUntil their clients see the iops of Lightsail's non-local SSDs. Don't know of any other VPS provider that uses network as their only storage. Small boxes will likely not run a memory-only job (they only have 1GB), so I doubt that Lightsail will be used for much more than reverse-proxying traffic from AWS to get huge discounts there.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- debt 10y agoi'm still using linode. been using it for 10 years.
- esteer 10y agoI'm a little confused. How is this different from EC2?
- the_angry_angel 10y agoI'd assume the guarantee of the box being up, unlike ec2.
- jewbacca 10y agoAs far as I can tell, it's "just" the relevant AWS services, repackaged in a more non-expert-friendly frontend, simplified for a DigitalOcean-like usecase. Doesn't expose the full, intimidating complexity of the AWS management console and workflow.
- falcolas 10y agoWorth noting: $0.09 per GB for bandwidth overages. So, your $5 server with 1TB out becomes a $95 if you have 2TB out.
- geostyx 10y agoAlso worth noting their competition (DO/Linode) only cost $0.02/GB overage.
- STRML 10y agoYet, this is the same cost on EC2 for the first 10TB, except you don't get 1TB for free with EC2. So essentially you're getting $90 worth of egress traffic for $5. It's even more obvious now that EC2 egress pricing is ridiculous.
- drej 10y agoI use AWS for a bunch of things, but the console has always been immensely painful to use, especially to create a no frills simple VPS for a fiver. For that reason alone, I use DigitalOcean and fiddle with AWS authentication if I need to use some of its services there. Lightsail looks excellent since the setup is just a gazillion times more user friendly than the standard EC2. A single page affair, a launch script, authentication, it's all there. Once launched, I get all the info and metrics I need. I kinda wish they streamlined their usual console to this level, but this way it's fine as well. I don't tend to use S3 and EC2 as much as I'd like given its non-existent UX, but this gives me hope that Amazon is taking user experience seriously. Sure, it may be underpowered compared to DO or Linode, but having all services under one roof is worth it to me. I'm happy.
- scotchio 10y agoInteresting. Pricing is worse than Digital Ocean here. Looks like Linode is still best bang for buck strictly for price to power. Random thoughts from shameless noob: - I like Digital Ocean's OS/app images for speed / smaller projects. Looks like Lightsail offers this with Bitnami. Not sure how complicated that is in their console. - Amazon IAM comes with a bit too much overhead for noobies like myself. Glad this doesn't require you to set that up when you just want a quick and dirty VPS. - Bah. Resizing/upgrading requires you to do it through API currently. That kind of sucks. - Nice! 30 day free trial.
- 2bluesc 10y agoPrice 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 ---------- $20/mo LightSail: 2GB, 1, 40GB SSD, 3TB DO: 2GB, 2, 40GB SSD, 3TB VULTR: 2GB, 2, 45GB SSD, 3TB Linode: 4GB, 2, 48GB SSD, 3TB ---------- $40/mo LightSail: 4GB, 2, 60GB SSD, 4TB DO: 4GB, 2, 60GB SSD, 4TB VULTR: 4GB, 4, 45GB SSD, 4TB Linode: 8GB, 4, 96GB SSD, 4TB ---------- $80/mo LightSail: 8GB, 2, 80GB SSD, 5TB DO: 8GB, 4, 80GB SSD, 5TB VULTR: 8GB, 6, 150GB SSD, 5TB Linode: 12GB, 6, 192GB SSD, 8TB In an easier to read gist: https://gist.github.com/637693650bc8bb9baadf6293a99e1813 https://gist.github.com/637693650bc8bb9baadf6293a99e1813
- zzzcpan 10y agoCurious, 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?
- rickyc091 10y agoIt's probably since the ones listed above are the typical VPS to go to when it comes to cheap hosting. The ones you mentioned are lesser known.
- idm 10y agoDoes anybody care about the answer to your question? In all likelihood, the answer is: because that information is even more work to collect. Your post reminds me of the burden of proof fallacy, in which you create work for other people by asking questions you could easily answer yourself. If you or anybody posts the comparison you requested, it will surely be upvoted.
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- polack 10y agoThe more you pay the worse performance (per $) you get. Pretty much a "take 2 pay for 3" kind of deal. No matter if it's a good price or not I would feel like a schmuck if I went for any other option than the 5$ one.
- N0RMAN 10y agotl;dr Only available in us-east-1 (N. Virginia)
- r1ch 10y agoWish this was more obvious. Signed up only to find out during creation that this was the case. Was hoping to see how the Seoul location routing was as I'm looking for a cheap VPS with low Asia-EU latency (ie not across the US).
- dx034 10y agoOVH has good connections in that direction. Don't have a lot of data to back this up (not much traffic from the region), but the tests I ran looked good. And it's certainly cheaper than lightsail
- djrogers 10y agoThis seems like a great option for a utility server for existing AWS customers. With VPC peering you get free and fast transfer between one of these and your existing AWS infrastructure, but in a nice one-price VPS. I also wouldn't be too surprised to see some people using these as middle-man boxes to reduce transfer costs associated with EC2 - $5 for 1TB is darned cheap for AWS. Using one of these to back up data from some EC2 hosts would be a win.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- Kephael 10y agoWith how versatile the AWS ecosystem is and the quality of the Amazon brand this has the potential to absolutely demolish most of the small time VPS providers. Unless you provide a niche such as DDoS protection or PCI/HIPAA compliant hosting I do not see how you can compete for legitimate customers.
- brandur 10y agoNice: a much needed simplification of the AWS product surface area. While their plethora of functions and features are tremendously useful for big shops, but are a pretty high bar newer entrants. Now if they could just get to the point where $5 gets you a running Docker container running on the equivalent of the Lightsail VPS (without setting up the backing EC2 infrastructure like ECS), I suspect that's closer to the platform that many users really want to have ...
- sidcool 10y agoNoob question. How's this different from an EC2 instance in a VPC?
- smiled0g 10y agoSame thing. You get a VPS, but more non-AWS-expert friendly with less complicated pricing structure.
- cobookman 10y agoMy quick 5 second take is that lightsail gives you shared vCPUs/memory and cheaper bandwidth. But I'm still confused myself.
- Someone1234 10y agoIt isn't meant to be different, it is just "packaged" to make setting up a working AWS instance cheap and easy. If you're familiar with AWS then you can get a similar offering directly, particularly using reserved instance pricing.
- danso 10y agoWow, what perfect timing. I just got approved for AWS Educate and was prepared to do the work to batch auto-provision EC2 instances for my students, but this is much easier to deal with. And at $5 a month for the cheapest machine, it's about what I would have paid to set up a t2-nano instance (~$4.70). I didn't need anything fancy, just wanted students to have their own machine to deploy public-facing code (e.g. APIs). The in-browser SSH also deals with the problem of students who are on Windows machine. You haven't hated PuTTY until you've tried walking a student through it on their Surface Pro.
- EasyTiger_ 10y agoStill isn't enough for me to pull my sites off DO. Plus, DO don't have a reputation for treating staff like absolute dogshit.
- api 10y agoNot terribly impressed. It's like Digital Ocean and Vultr but with no IPv6 and no direct network interface. What I love about VPSes as opposed to AWS, Azure, or Google is that you get a completely a la carte box with a direct interface right to the Internet and both IPv4 and an IPv6 /64. You can instantly provision "servers" that you can do anything you want with -- you can treat them like "pets" to run a personal blog or a legacy app, or you can herd them like "cattle" with your favorite management and provisioning tools. The pricing is great and the infrastructure is mix and match. Many VPS providers (Vultr and I think DO as well) will even let you upload and install an ISO directly onto the KVM instance over the web. That means you can install OpenBSD or even weird OSes. I've heard of people putting wacky stuff like OS/2 in the cloud this way. Some even allow nested virtualization. A VPS is ideal for a large number of common work loads, but not all. For things where I want to make extensive use of AWS's managed services or where I want to have something more akin to a private data center, EC2 and similar offerings from Microsoft and Google are great. But for those I want the whole enchilada. If I'm going there I want everything the EC2 management console and API gives me including full-blown VPC, etc. This seems to occupy an uncanny valley. Without IPv6, direct networking, etc. it's a crummy VPS, but it's not as rich as EC2. The only pluses I see are direct access to AWS services (but if I want that I probably want EC2) and AWS's security and uptime "guarantees." Problem with the latter is that it's largely marketing. I've routinely clocked 300-day-plus uptimes on Digital Ocean and I've also had EC2 instances mysterious die or go into a coma. They might have something to say on security, but I've never seen any real proof that AWS security is intrinsically superior to their competition. Neither DO nor Vultr has had a recent major breach AFIAK and they all seem to use the same virtualization tech.
- tyingq 10y agoI can almost feel the pucker over at DigitalOcean, Linode, etc. It may not be a better product, but that doesn't necessarily matter, given the brand power.
- pesfandiar 10y agoAgreed. Everything else equal, I'd personally go with the more stable IaaS provider as opposed to fringe ones that can go out of business or be acquired out of existence.
- ralmidani 10y agoA quick look at the pricing shows these are plagued by the same problems as DO's offerings: only RAM scales linearly with price, while CPU, storage, and data transfer do not. Linode and OVH, while not as prestigious as AWS and DO, offer much more fair pricing when you need more resources.
- dschulz 10y agoI don't see anything disruptive here. I already have roughly the same cost/benefit with Linode.
- bfrog 10y agoCorrection, you see a piss poor attempt at competing with Linode/DO/Vultr with no guarantees you won't piss away thousands by mistake or suffer magical and impossible to understand performance issues.
- St-Clock 10y agoThey advertise a 99.95% EC2 SLA. Does that mean that an instance in a single AZ can go down anytime for any length of time?
- meritt 10y agoIs there anything preventing me from using these servers as proxies with incredibly cheap bandwidth? I assume it stacks? When we reach transfer limits I can just spin up an additional $5 instance to add another 1TB? $5/mo per 1TB of bandwidth = $5.00 / 1024 = $0.0049/GB compared to EC2's normal $0.09/GB -- That's a 91-95% discount on egress data!
- fieryskiff 10y agoImmediately thought about this "solution" to bandwith overage charges as well. Would not be surprised if it ended up getting you disabled for abuse or going against the TOC, etc.
- tyingq 10y agoThe documentation for LightSail specifically calls out integration with other AWS services, how to get them connected via private IPS, etc. https://lightsail.aws.amazon.com/ls/docs/overview/article/using-lightsail-with-other-aws-services?fid=21D3C81602910D31-309A949BC886B2BF https://lightsail.aws.amazon.com/ls/docs/overview/article/us... Of course, after your initial allotment of cheap bandwidth, LightSail switches to the regular AWS egress prices.
- edutechnion 10y agoPrecisely right. It will be fascinating to see if Lightsail creation can be automated via Terraform or Cloudformation, and the $0.09 per GB for outgoing bandwidth can be easily subverted with this new pricing structure.
- adventured 10y agoSort of. Lightsail service limits: "You can currently create up to 20 Lightsail instances, 5 static IPs, and 3 DNS domain zones in a Lightsail account." So obviously there's a hard cap within one account. The $80 account comes with 5tb, so one would have to be burning a bit of bandwidth - 100tb - to cap it out. Frankly though, at $1600, Amazon is still printing a massive profit margin on that 100tb of transfer. These seem like they'd be good front-end servers hooked up to RDS etc.
- hackcrafter 10y agoWhat I was hoping for was a bare-metal (not-run through VMs) container runtime like Joyent Triton[0] but with more pay-for-what-you-use pricing. Unlike VMs, which statically allocate mem whether you use it or not, containers have the chance to grow and reduce mem as workfloads go up and down, which means you could pay for GB/h of mem usage on the right-sized # of vCPU base. Not sure if any IaaS/PaaS is doing this. Joyent pricing[1] is still for static resource allocation and not cheap compared to these larger players. [0] https://www.joyent.com/triton https://www.joyent.com/triton [1] https://www.joyent.com/pricing https://www.joyent.com/pricing
- raitom 10y agoMeanwhile, in France: https://www.scaleway.com/ https://www.scaleway.com/ Same thing with OVH, you can get a powerful dedicated server with unlimited bandwidth for the price of a medium EC2 instance. I hope they will open their datacenter in California soon.
- msh 10y agoI don't understand how they can live on those prices. I have their 3 euro arm server and have no problem pushing more than a 100 megabit a second from it.
- loader 10y agoIt's two fold. Amazon bandwidth is, I assume, premium tier 1. Where as ovh and scaleway are probably lower tier. Lower tier bandwidth is dirt cheap, like below $0.25 per mbps. Edit: 3 things, it's also shared among a lot of users that don't use what they can. For everyone using 100mbps there's probably 20 who use less then 1mbps.
- chx 10y agoRight. We have a 3EUR a month VPS serving as a backup server, it is a MySQL slave, doing a snapshot regularly and sending the snapshot off to a storage VPS. It certainly doesn't use 1mbps except when it rsyncs to the storage.
- dx034 10y agoOVH has a pretty solid network and are very transparent about peering and utilization.[1] The network is definitely much smaller than Amazon, but never had any problems with their peering, the network seems to have ample capacity (whereas Hetzner had less reliable peering). I have several servers in the OVH network in Europe and I get consistently high speeds for Europe&US, independent of the time I test (don't have much traffic from Asia so can't really test that). They will offer you better peering if you pay extra, but even then you're paying much less than at AWS for high traffic. I suspect that AWS makes most profit with bandwidth while other services run with a very low margin. [1] http://weathermap.ovh.net/ http://weathermap.ovh.net/
- Hello71 10y agoThe FAQ is extremely unclear, but if I'm understanding it right, doesn't this make transfer out to Internet significantly cheaper if you insist on using AWS? Instead of paying $0.09/GB, transfer to Lightsail for $0.02/GB then transfer out for $5/1000 GB=$0.005/GB. You do have to deal with changing IP, but you get a 1.26 order of magnitude decrease in price, and that's assuming you don't bother actually using the extra compute.
- finnh 10y agoThe "transfer to Lightsail" step (from another AWS resource) is free, as long as you use the private IP.
- eloff 10y agoNo, unless you setup VPC peering between the shadow lightsail VPC and your AWS VPC, otherwise you'll be charged at least the $0.01/GB on egress, and maybe the $0.01/GB on ingress into lightsail too (not sure, the wording makes it ambiguous, one would have to try it.)
- dx034 10y agoThere are no ingress charges on lightsail, so the cost should max. be $0.01/GB. Still cheaper than paying egress on AWS.
- terda12 10y agoWhen I started out webdev, I was told that I should use AWS. But not having known how private/pubkeys work, or how ssh workds, how servers worked, it felt a lot like being thrown in the deep end of the pool. Then I used digitalocean because of the free 1 year server time github gave me and everything was a breeze. They had tutorials for a lot of stuff, like how pubkeys and privatekeys worked, how to use ssh, how a server works, how to use nginx/apache, and even node.js stuff. I got up and running quickly even though it was my first time using a VPS. It was super easy, and the best part was with my knowledge gained from DigitalOcean, I was able to start using AWS with relative ease. I think Lightsail is a good competitor to DigitalOcean, good for newbies who can't exactly figure out how much their server will use and charge them. But imo, with the same stats and stuff as DigitalOcean as a newbie I'd stick with DigitalOcean just because of how helpful their tutorials are in general and how helpful their interface is.
- IgorPartola 10y agoThis is a non-starter without IPv6. I know some of you will be tempted to jump ship from DO and Vultr, but please remember that by doing so you will continue enabling Amazon to hold back progress. While ignoring AWS is not really an option, as it offers some very unique features that are quite useful, this thing does not. DO is not great in this regard as their butcher their allocations, but Vultr gives each VPS a proper /64. Scaleway has partial IPv6 support (not for their bare metal could, but their VPS's do support it). I urge you to vote with your wallets, unless you really like paying $1/month or more per IP for the foreseeable future.
- abiox 10y ago> enabling Amazon to hold back progress what do you mean?
- darkstar999 10y agoIP V6 is progress over 4.
- TheSmiddy 10y agoWe're running out of IPv4 addresses and need to move to 100% IPv6 ASAP or else we're going to end up with a system where it's NAT all the way down.
- floatboth 10y agoYeah, Scaleway has IPv6 on the VPSes and the AMD64 dedicated servers, but not on ARM servers. 2core/2GB/50GB is a better offering than DigitalOcean's. Sadly, it seems like they still don't have FreeBSD.
- arcdigital 10y agoIt's coming (one region now, more to come soon), not sure about Lightsail though. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-ipv6-support-for-ec2-instances-in-virtual-private-clouds https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-ipv6-support-for-ec2-in...
- jjcm 10y agoKeep 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.
- popol12 10y agoOVH is still cheaper, with half the disk space but 4 time the RAM.
- sathishvj 10y agoHopefully Google Computer Engine will also compete at this price now. Even though it seems to be cheaper than AWS in addition to having a good interface, it'd be good to get a bunch of cheaper servers to do the small projects and also give it out to developers in situations where static ips are a requirement.
- adnanh 10y agoSmall print: Some types of data transfer in excess of data transfer included in your plan is subject to overage charges.
- STRML 10y agoA 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, so I'm sure it's not. A few runs with `fio` confirms this is EBS GP2 or slower: The bench: "fio --name=randrw --ioengine=libaio --direct=1 --bs=4k --iodepth=64 --size=4G --rw=randrw --rwmixread=75 --gtod_reduce=1" Lightsail $5: read : io=3071.7MB, bw=9199.7KB/s, iops=2299, runt=341902msec write: io=1024.4MB, bw=3067.1KB/s, iops=766, runt=341902msec DigitalOcean $5: read : io=3071.7MB, bw=242700KB/s, iops=60674, runt= 12960msec write: io=1024.4MB, bw=80935KB/s, iops=20233, runt= 12960msec More than an order of magnitude difference in the storage subsystems. These appear to just be t2.nano instances (CPU perf is good, E5-2676 v3 @ 2.40 GHz, http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench3/8164581 http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench3/8164581). For advanced users, there isn't much compelling here to make up for the administration overhead. It's a little cheaper than a similar-spec t2.nano (roughly $4.75 on-demand + $3 for a 30GB SSD). The real win is egress cost; you can transfer EC2->Lightsail for free. 1TB of egress would be nearly $90 on EC2, but is only $5 on Lightsail. In other news, EC2 egress pricing is obviously ridiculous.
- JonoBB 10y agoThe terrible IOPS performance on AWS is the biggest downside for me. All competitors seem to outstrip AWS on this. Do they have some legacy infrastructure that is just too big too upgrade to something more modern, or is this "on purpose"?
- STRML 10y agoIt's just an artifact of network-attached storage. Many competitors just use local storage, which comes with its own serious downsides for the company and customer. DigitalOcean just recently launched its Volumes service, but it's very limited compared to EBS, and not nearly as fast as its local SSDs. EBS is generally fine but I would really enjoy the option to have ~40GB local SSDs for caching (but I suppose you can always grab an r3/r4 and cache in memory if that's your bag). The best cloud I/O perf I've seen, bar none, comes from Joyent's Triton containers. Beats even DO by 3-4x. Beyond that you need to go bare-metal.
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- usaphp 10y agoDigital Ocean still has a better pricing, for example for $20 on Digital Ocean you are getting 2 CPU server vs 1 cpu on amazon. Also $80 Digital Ocean offers 4CPU server while Amazon gives you only 2CPU.
- nsebban 10y agoIt seems to me the exact same service existed already, by picking a stack on Bitnami's website, and single-click-launching it on AWS. The price structure is clearer on Lightsail though.
- ridruejo 10y agoLightsail also uses Bitnami stacks underneath, so it is very similar indeed. It is an easier way to get started with AWS but with the potential to graduate to the full offering
- ngrilly 10y agoVery smart move from Amazon. The main advantage of Amazon LightSail over DigitalOcean are: built-in firewall (instead of messing with iptables), managed database with AWS RDS, and using S3 with a low latency and no networking cost.
- nodesocket 10y agoDigitalOcean must implement a centralized firewall. This is the missing piece for them.
- edgan 10y agoThe best way to thing about security groups is that they are switch based firewall rules.
- wazoox 10y agoI still don't get the VPS craze. For similar prices from OVH, online.net, Hetzner, etc. you've got vastly more powerful physical servers with vastly larger storage... What's the point really?
- boyter 10y agoInfrastructure as code. Use the API the build machines from scratch on demand. It can be a very powerful model if done well, or done poorly cost a lot for less performance. I use Hetzner myself for my large projects but the machines were configured using the same scripts I practiced over and over again on DO.
- chrisper 10y agoIt seems that you can only create instances in Virginia and you can only choose between Ubuntu 16.04 and Amazon Linux.
- ne0free 10y agoI pay ~25$ for 8 gb - 1tb - unlimited bw From online.net.. 80$ is ridiculous
- msh 10y agoStrange, I can't seem to find the price of bandwidth when you exceed the included 1 TB.
- mbrookes 10y ago$0.09/ GB ($90/TB). Good luck if you host a service which then gets HN or Reddit hugged!
- nodesocket 10y agoI've been on the front page of HN multiple times, you won't even come close to the $5 limit of 1 TB. This is ridiculous.
- dx034 10y agoDifferent if you're on the front page of reddit, or on some popular subreddit. If you don't have all static files on a CDN you can easily exceed 1TB within a few days. Assuming it's a side project that you're not constantly monitoring and you're away for a few days, you could find a hefty bill when you come back.
- Guest98123 10y agoLet 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 dealing with reserved instances, and trying to buy them at the correct time of the year to line up with price drops. Now, I need to consider dumping my autoscaling groups, EC2 web servers, and moving them to LightSail? Why not just give us a fair price on bandwidth, instead of more complications?
- nik736 10y agoThey want to destroy DigitalOcean, so they have to match their pricing. Additional traffic is also $0,09 / GB with Lightsail.
- Matheus28 10y agoAnd that's incredibly expensive, considering many other cloud providers around the level of DigitalOcean (which I believe doesn't charge for using too much bandwidth atm) charge a lot less. For example, Linode charges $0.02/GB after the allocated bandwidth And specifically for Linode, since all the servers draw from the same pool of resources, you can instead create a ton of $10 servers and grab bandwidth for $0.005/GB, which Linode is perfectly fine with (note that bandwidth is pro-rated, so you'd need to create those servers in the beginning of the month to take full advantage of it).
- swuecho 10y agoI do not think they can. I am happy with Digital Ocean almost 3 years. Did not have any problem and pretty happy with it.
- nielsole 10y agoFrom https://amazonlightsail.com/docs/ https://amazonlightsail.com/docs/ > Data transfer OUT from a Lightsail instance to another Lightsail instance or AWS resource is also free while the private IP address of the instance is used. It could even be worth it to set Lightsail up as reverse proxy and profit off of very cheap(for AWS) traffic e.g. for S3. I can't really believe they would allow this. Am I missing something?
- nepotism2016 10y agoThis site can’t be reached I guess I google virtual private servers
- amq 10y agoSo, it is basically the EC2 "t" family with a simpler (but almost equal) pricing and simpler administration. t2.nano = $5 t2.micro = $10 t2.small = $20 t2.medium = $40 t2.large = $80
- simonebrunozzi 10y agoThis is going to be a hard blow for DigitalOcean. I don't have huge hopes for their business going forward.
- xfalcox 10y agoJust ran a bench on then, and the Disk per is bad. https://gist.github.com/xfalcox/3b99beac4935fd154a4cbeb540dc45f3 https://gist.github.com/xfalcox/3b99beac4935fd154a4cbeb540dc...
- seoguru 10y agowhat did you use for those benchies? would like to run it.
- xfalcox 10y agohttps://github.com/mgutz/vpsbench https://github.com/mgutz/vpsbench
- mbrookes 10y agoWhat Amazon doesn't advertise is that their "block" volumes are files on NFS NAS storage.
- juliand 10y agoJust for the record, I did the same on one of my small azure machines: CPU model: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2673 v3 @ 2.40GHz Number of cores: 1 CPU frequency: 2394.441 MHz Total amount of RAM: 3439 MB Total amount of swap: MB System uptime: 6 days, 15:49, I/O speed: 20.1 MB/s Bzip 25MB: 4.27s Download 100MB file: 6.15MB/s
- sgloutnikov 10y agoWhile on this topic, does anyone have any experience with DreamCompute (https://www.dreamhost.com/cloud/computing https://www.dreamhost.com/cloud/computing)? I was thinking about trying them out, but could not find any reviews/thoughts about them. They seem to offer a lot, for very low prices. Here's more -- https://help.dreamhost.com/hc/en-us/articles/217744568-What-is-DreamCompute-Predictable-Bill https://help.dreamhost.com/hc/en-us/articles/217744568-What-...
- brianbreslin 10y agoThis puts DigitalOcean in a tough spot. They aren't going after the top-tier get your hands dirty customers AWS usually caters to, and they aren't going after the no-tech skills audience of godaddy/bluehost/dreamhost etc. So now it becomes a marketing battle for the middle.
- zyngaro 10y agoVery expensive. The 40$/mo plan on Linode, gives and you 4 cores and 8GB ram.
- chm 10y agoIt depends on the processors the machines use and the actual sharing of these processors. I agree it looks more expensive but it might not be upon further analysis.
- mark242 10y agoQuick feedback for the AWS team: * First, this is great. The simplified interface vs EC2 is terrific. This is the direction EC2 (and RDS and S3 and basically everything) needs to be going. * Instances you start in LightSail don't show up in your EC2 console. I would expect there to be some kind of data sharing there. * Similarly, creating a "static IP address" doesn't show up in your elastic IP list. I'm not sure if this is intentional, but to manage two different views of products that you're billing me for is... troublesome. * Last, if I could migrate elastic IPs from EC2 to LightSail I'd be migrating all of my instances immediately. The bandwidth savings are massive. (Related: when is the 2TB limit for a t2.small going to be migrated over to EC2?)
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- devhxinc 10y agohttp://imgur.com/4iGafDz http://imgur.com/4iGafDz
- nikolay 10y agoDigital Ocean is in trouble!
- dx034 10y agoDon't think so. Not for any disk-heavy or bandwidth-heavy users.
- mfisher87 10y agoWhy are a full half of the front-page stories about Amazon?
- jedisct1 10y agoLightsail: $5/mo 512 MB, 1 core, 20 GB SSD, bandwidth cap -- Scaleway: $3.2/mo 2 GB memory, 2 cores, 50 GB SSD, unmetered bandwidth. Lightsail 2: $10/mo 1 GB memory, 1 core, 30 GB SSD, bandwidth cap -- Scaleway: $10/mo 8 GB memory, 6 cores, 200 GB SSD, unmetered bandwidth. OVH virtual servers have also always been cheaper than Lightsail, and bandwidth is of course unmetered: https://www.ovh.com/us/vps/vps-ssd.xml https://www.ovh.com/us/vps/vps-ssd.xml
- nik736 10y agoThe performance of DO is far superior compared to Lightsail. Disk speed is a joke, network seems to be limited to 50MB/s (which is not that bad) and who knows how much they throttle the CPU.
- unoti 10y agoNo nonsense predictable pricing is what drove me to Rackspace years ago. Good for Amazon figuring this out.
- gigatexal 10y agomeh the pricing fails in comparison to say linode.com's offerings. https://www.linode.com/pricing https://www.linode.com/pricing granted with AWS you probably get access to other AWS products so there's that...
- bfrog 10y agoOne day their pricing and performance might actually be competitive. Today is not that day.
- secabeen 10y agoThis is pretty good. I'm currently paying about $3.50/mo for my existing t2.nano-based reserved VPS, and this provides a lot more space and bandwidth for not much more money. If they offered it with a reserved-instance discount, it would be even more compelling.
- neom 10y agoGiven the long term strategy of DigitalOcean and how vastly different it is from what AWS seems to be executing on, I don't think this announcement actually changes things for DO that much. There is a mass consolidation about to happen in the IaaS space and it's smart for AWS to capture some amount of that.
- tamalsaha001 10y agoThis is exciting. In case any AWS folks are reading this, are there any plans to support Debian 8 as Bare OS?
- imdsm 10y agoPSA: The chap in the photo is wearing a cape.
- ilaksh 10y agohttps://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/does-digital-ocean-come-with-a-cape-and-a-motorcycle-like-amazon-lightsail https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/does-digita...
- soccerdave 10y agoThis is very appealing to me just because of the amount of bandwidth that is included. I currently serve 20TB/month of static assets for only $160 spread among Softlayer, Digital Ocean and Linode VPSs. If I can host my static assets on the same network as AWS for the same price then that is a huge win, especially since all new Softlayer VPSs only come with a measly amount of bandwidth.
- brilliantcode 10y agoWhat a day for AWS on HN. 8 AWS products made it to front page. I've learned new AWS product like Cognito today just from the comments (ironically in the "Google is Challenging AWS" thread). I feel as excited as I was for Azure's Build 2016. Now I'm feeling pulled to AWS. This is great for AWS, not so much for Google Cloud which further fades into obscurity in my mind. I'd love to see that change, more competition in the cloud space = more options for us developers = more conditions in our favour. Amazon LightSail just killed digitalocean for me which has been steadily getting more expensive (for instance I can't downsize to a less expensive plan once I resize my image, meaning I forked out $100/month for something that would work for $5/month + multiple DO images now cost monthly fee. $5/month + tight integration with AWS products is enough for me to move completely off DO. If only AWS had DO's community style documentation, I'd definitely question DO's future viability. Now a killer IDE from AWS that lets me deploy and configure AWS without leaving the IDE, that's a checkmate move, which I think will be very difficult for me to switch to another cloud provider. Right now things are in flux but I think an in-browser/desktop IDE like Cloud 9 with one click deploy to AWS would be the end game for other cloud providers.
- mgberlin 10y agoTheir yearly conference, Re:Invent, is going on this week, so there will probably be more announcements to come.
- neuronexmachina 10y agoYep, there's two keynotes at AWS, one Wednesday by the AWS CEO, and one tomorrow/Thursday by the AWS CTO Werner Vogels. I'm expecting quite a few more announcements during the Vogels keynote.
- nikon 10y agoSorry how has AWS killed digitalocean? It's more expensive. With poor disk performance.
- eloff 10y ago
- kzisme 10y agoAm I understanding this correctly? DO and LightSail are close (if not) exactly the same spec wise? All that's I've read so far essentially states that.
- jedisct1 10y agoPrice breakdown LightSail vs DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode, OVH, and Online.net / Scaleway: https://gist.github.com/justjanne/205cc548148829078d4bf2fd394f50ae https://gist.github.com/justjanne/205cc548148829078d4bf2fd39...
- ridruejo 10y agoPeople focusing just on pricing miss the point. The key factor here is that it is easy to get started but if you need to scale you have the full power of AWS offering and ecosystem that cannot be matched by VPS providers
- magicbuzz 10y agoSigh. US-only. That kills it for me.
- nodesocket 10y agoI am the only one interested in performance? Do these perform like t2 instances (http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/t2-instances.html http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/t2-instan...) which are burstable and capped? What's are the network limits? Are the disks physical or using EBS? I don't understand why everybody on this thread is complaining about overages? If you use more than the allocated amount you pay overages, simple idea. Why in the world, would you want your server to just shut down when you reach a limit?
- nodesocket 10y agoI just created two 512MB Ubuntu instances and here are my thoughts. (+ indicates positive, - indicates negative, ? question) + You can use private networking for cross-instance communication. + You can even communicate with other AWS services by using VPC peering. + Hourly billing. - The firewall rules are not shared. You can't create a single rule and attach to multiple instances. ? What are the network throughput caps? Can't find it anywhere? ? Are the disk physical or using EBS? ? Can you snapshot a running instance, or does it have to stopped?
- pritambarhate 10y agoThe FAQs mention that the disks are EBS.
- ilaksh 10y agoIf you read the fine print, the price and performance isn't actually as good as Digital Ocean and a few other similar services, so unless you actually are using AWS services AND need your VM to be in the same VPC or data center as the services, then it doesn't make sense.
- tomphoolery 10y agoWow I didn't know Amazon bought DigitalOcean ;-)
- jsamuel 10y agoConfirmed that LightSail works with ServerPilot (https://serverpilot.io/ https://serverpilot.io/). LightSail's default firewall opens ports 22 (SSH) and 80 (HTTP) but has 443 (HTTPS) closed. That seems like a terrible default for making a developer-friendly service. Hopefully they fix that and open 443 by default. Otherwise, a lot of wasted time is going to be spent by developers who have configured SSL on their sites and don't know why it isn't working. LightSail feels very similar to DreamCompute that DreamHost launched, including the approach of only allowing SSH public key auth without any option of using password auth. So, they're intentionally leaving out some users with that approach.
- dbdhbdvdv 10y agoFbdnnd
- SwellJoe 10y agoIt's funny to me that Amazon has looped all the way back around to this, while a bunch of smaller providers who've been doing this for over a decade have been trying to catch up with AWS on all the other fronts. But, realistically, for a lot of users, AWS is a stupidly complex beast just to get a website up and running. I've written a bunch of code that interacts with AWS APIs in two languages, and I still require a couple of hours to spin up anything new there. But, as others note, the variable cost factor seems to still be a sticking point. I can setup a Digital Ocean droplet, or Linode, or one of a dozen other low-cost VPS providers, for $5 or $10 a month, and I know it will never cost more than that. Maybe I'll bump into memory, disk, or bandwidth limits...but, AWS is a killer if you aren't careful. I used to maintain (and pay for, out of pocket) a non-profit's website on AWS, and the price ballooned while I wasn't paying attention, due to automated backups to S3 and some other stuff, and by the time I noticed was costing me $183/month, for a website that could easily run on a cheap VPS. My fault for not paying closer attention, not setting up cost alerts, etc., but I moved the site off of AWS and onto one of my own web servers, where it literally costs me single digit dollars to run (it has many GBs of email but otherwise is a small site with very low traffic). So...unless they're giving me some reason to think I won't end up with a massive bill one month because of a popular post, or something, I probably still won't think "I know, I'll use AWS!", unless it's a situation where I need the scaling capabilities of AWS.
- dorfsmay 10y agoThe pricing/specs are suspiciously very similar to one of the largest VPS provider.
- rjurney 10y agoWhat is this service? I can't figure out how different it is from Linux on EC2.
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- utopcell 10y agoHaving upper ceilings in charging is a big deal for me. For this I prefer https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/ https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/
- stevesun21 10y agoI really like the web based firewall configuration feature. Hope Linode and DO adopte it.
- clooless 10y agoJust created a "Magento" instance and attached a static IP. It still unreachable with a browser after a few hours. What did I do wrong?
- chintan16 10y agoTime to move from DigitalOcean finally
- josh_carterPDX 10y agoSeems like a play to compete with Digital Ocean.
- awssailin 10y agoThis is extremely, really, amazingly, exciting news! Except for the potential charge gotchas in the FAQ which seems to fly in the face of the banner text on the main page but still...very exciting!
- alexjv89 10y agoThis is super awesome... Lesser devops requirement particularly in early stages trying to validate an idea.
- kkotak 10y agoNo Windows Server? Surprising.
- nodesocket 10y agoI just ran speedtest.net on a $5/mo 512MB DigitalOcean droplet in the San Francisco (SFO1) datacenter. ~ speedtest-cli Retrieving speedtest.net configuration... Testing from DigitalOcean (192.241.229.48)... Retrieving speedtest.net server list... Selecting best server based on ping... Hosted by Monkey Brains (San Francisco, CA) [5.93 km]: 2.132 ms Testing download Download: 921.09 Mbit/s Testing upload Upload: 705.31 Mbit/s Can anybody run speedtest-cli[1] on a 512MB LightSail instance to compare network throughput? [1] https://github.com/sivel/speedtest-cli https://github.com/sivel/speedtest-cli
- dx034 10y agoThe problem with speedtest-cli is that the servers are set up to test domestic accounts, not other servers. You can be lucky and get ~1GBs bandwidth, but just because you don't doesn't mean that it's the fault of the provider. The server specs and speedtest only require a 1Gbit/s port, so you will probably not get higher results than yours anyway. Network speed should generally not be the issue with AWS, it's disk iops where the non-local SSDs will make a major impact.
- nodesocket 10y agoAgree speedtest-cli is not perfect, but you can see from my test I got near the 1Gbps that DigitalOcean advertises. I am curious if AWS LightSail even breaks 100Mbps. In terms of network speed not being important, that's not true. Lots of workloads are network bound not i/o bound (load balancers, web servers, etc).
- dx034 10y agoThat's what I meant. The results show that the DO box is fast enough, but a slow result doesn't indicate that you can't saturate traffic. It's really hard to test without real-world traffic, haven't found a reliable way to do so yet.
- ksec 10y agoWhy 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.
- BlackMonday 10y agoWhy would I use that? With Hosteurope I get 4 vCores, 6 GByte guranteed memory (burst to 12), 200 GByte SSD, traffic flat (but only 100 MBity/sec), monthly cacelable for 20 euros.
- corford 10y agoHardly a Linode or DO killer yet but could become interesting if/when they: 1). support more linux distros (hint: Debian) 2). let you place instances in other AWS regions 3). let you pool bandwidth quotas across instances 4). improve the cpu/memory competitiveness of their $20+ plans Also, don't like the firewall being configured via the dashboard (reminds me of the same crappy approach used by scaleway). Alarming too that their SSH console auto logs you in (even if you started an instance with your own public key rather than Amazon's).
- wcummings 10y agoCan I migrate EC2 instances?
- homero 10y agoWow they're going after digital ocean
- riledhel 10y agoIs there a way to quickly/easily migrate EC2 instances to LightSail??
- andromad 10y agoThis is how aws trying to re:invent ...a lot of stuffs from them this year is trying to crash those smaller saas provider and the open source world like chalice... It seems like they are reinvent the wheel and try hard to grab every single tiny piece of market. I am moving to gcp...at least they handle oos better