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"and it's _clearly_ not a high priority for Amazon to complete for the pennies a month available in the race-to-the-bottom webhosting that people like GoDaddy s

by __jal 10y ago

"and it's _clearly_ not a high priority for Amazon to complete for the pennies a month available in the race-to-the-bottom webhosting that people like GoDaddy sell for $12/year." Except that that's what this announcement is. Which makes me think this may be AZON's fix to runaway billing - if you don't have the resources to pay for mistakes[1], stay in the per-month kiddie pool and don't play with the heavy machinery. [1] I started to add, "or trust yourself not to make them", but that's silly, because mistakes will happen.

zenlikethat 10y ago
I'd guess it's more to scoop up mindshare and make getting started easier, which almost assuredly leads to future upsells. That developer who starts prototyping a project on AWS instead of DigitalOcean now might make them $$$$ they otherwise wouldn't have down the line when that person needs to scale and doesn't want the huge pain of switching providers.
- jholman 10y ago
  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.

by __jal 10y ago

zenlikethat 10y ago

I'd guess it's more to scoop up mindshare and make getting started easier, which almost assuredly leads to future upsells. That developer who starts prototyping a project on AWS instead of DigitalOcean now might make them $$$$ they otherwise wouldn't have down the line when that person needs to scale and doesn't want the huge pain of switching providers.

jholman 10y ago
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.