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When I first began looking to take my web development skills live to a VPS / other services, this was one of the things that drove me away from even playing aro

When I first began looking to take my web development skills live to a VPS / other services, this was one of the things that drove me away from even playing around with AWS. Not sure what it is. I went with Digital Ocean, but even compared to Google Cloud or Microsoft Azure, Amazon's console area intimidates me, like I feel like I might get charged or trigger charges that will just rack up if I click on anything there. Maybe I'm just being paranoid, but I don't have the funds to risk playing around with their services and accidentally getting billed $100,000 or something.

anonytrary 9y ago
This is what I love about their free-tier. For some services, You get quite a bit of processing power per month for free for a year or so. These terms may have changed since I last read them. Still other services give you freemium resource usage. For example, I think CloudFront gives you a certain number of free cache-invalidations per month. I guess there's always the risk of someone hacking you, then eating up your AWS resources to mine coins. This could rack up a huge bill. I think this hacking risk is true for many cloud services, though. One way to prevent this is to use IAM users with limited resource usage, and basically freeze the root account. AWS is a lot less stressful to use when you assume a "nobody allowed" or "least privilege" approach. Sorry for the edits, I am drunk.
llarsson 9y ago
Well, first of all, there are default limits on everything that prevents you from racking up too huge bills (25 running EC2 instances, for instance). You have to go out of your way to get them raised. Second, they pretty much only charge per resource usage: CPU time, network traffic, and storage. Consume neither of those, and it is free. So it is free to set up really complicated virtual networks in the VPC part of the console, but you start paying once traffic flows in that network. The only insanely expensive part that you'd hate to enable is the "Dedicated IP Custom SSL" option in CloudFront, because that is $600 per month, as per their documentation[0]. > Because of the added cost associated with dedicating IP addresses per SSL certificate, we charge a fixed monthly fee of $600 for each custom SSL certificate you associate with your CloudFront distributions, pro-rated by the hour. [0] https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/custom-ssl-domains/ https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/custom-ssl-domains/
- toomuchtodo 9y ago
  Check out how much it is if you provision a CloudHSM (IIRC it’s $5k).
  - munns 9y ago
    fwiw a CloudHSM is a dedicated piece of hardware that is otherwise fairly expensive.
    - toomuchtodo 9y ago
      I mention it because its trivial to provision in AWS accounts. In sandbox accounts we provision for developers, we use AWS Orgs and service control policies to ensure IAM users with full privs can't provision an HSM.
- davidjnelson 9y ago
  good comment, mostly true. watch out for nat's - $30 per az.

anonytrary 9y ago

This is what I love about their free-tier. For some services, You get quite a bit of processing power per month for free for a year or so. These terms may have changed since I last read them. Still other services give you freemium resource usage. For example, I think CloudFront gives you a certain number of free cache-invalidations per month. I guess there's always the risk of someone hacking you, then eating up your AWS resources to mine coins. This could rack up a huge bill. I think this hacking risk is true for many cloud services, though. One way to prevent this is to use IAM users with limited resource usage, and basically freeze the root account. AWS is a lot less stressful to use when you assume a "nobody allowed" or "least privilege" approach. Sorry for the edits, I am drunk.

llarsson 9y ago

Well, first of all, there are default limits on everything that prevents you from racking up too huge bills (25 running EC2 instances, for instance). You have to go out of your way to get them raised. Second, they pretty much only charge per resource usage: CPU time, network traffic, and storage. Consume neither of those, and it is free. So it is free to set up really complicated virtual networks in the VPC part of the console, but you start paying once traffic flows in that network. The only insanely expensive part that you'd hate to enable is the "Dedicated IP Custom SSL" option in CloudFront, because that is $600 per month, as per their documentation[0]. > Because of the added cost associated with dedicating IP addresses per SSL certificate, we charge a fixed monthly fee of $600 for each custom SSL certificate you associate with your CloudFront distributions, pro-rated by the hour. [0] https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/custom-ssl-domains/ https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/custom-ssl-domains/

toomuchtodo 9y ago
Check out how much it is if you provision a CloudHSM (IIRC it’s $5k).
- munns 9y ago
  fwiw a CloudHSM is a dedicated piece of hardware that is otherwise fairly expensive.
  - toomuchtodo 9y ago
    I mention it because its trivial to provision in AWS accounts. In sandbox accounts we provision for developers, we use AWS Orgs and service control policies to ensure IAM users with full privs can't provision an HSM.
davidjnelson 9y ago
good comment, mostly true. watch out for nat's - $30 per az.