4 ms·

Remind HN: AWS Free Usage Tier Begins Today.

50 points by OoTheNigerian 16y ago

Will you be porting your apps? I am wondering how this will affect developer friendly hosts like Linode.

tibbon 16y ago
Unfortunately, I wasn't able to get in on this. I signed up for an AWS account right after micro instances launched. Yet, when I looked at them I realized they weren't as cheap as I initially thought (I had assumed the reserved instance fee covered you as your entire cost for the whole year). I didn't ever use it, but doing so made me ineligible for this. Emailed amazon twice. Very strict on brand new accounts only.
singer 16y ago
More info: http://aws.amazon.com/free http://aws.amazon.com/free
cperciva 16y ago
Related reminder: AWS free Data Transfer In has ended effective today (unless it gets extended again).
lsc 16y ago
>I am wondering how this will affect developer friendly hosts like Linode. I don't know... but I got a whole lot of signups after posting on the other thread about this, so I suspect it will have less of an impact than I originally feared.
- ido 16y ago
  I use prgmr & slicehost and just signed up for aws. I intend to use s3 to lighten up to load on my bandwidth limits by hosting the largest static files (media files in my case) there, but plan on remaining with the VPSs for all the rest.
cmelbye 16y ago
I'm not porting existing apps, but I'm using this as an opportunity to start a new one on a fresh system with a ton of tools available.
krobertson 16y ago
My fear is more how this will affect others already on AWS. More network latency issues? More EBS latency? Even though it is small, a large number of small users could only add to the problems others are feeling.
- cloudwalking 16y ago
  Are you unhappy with AWS? I was considering switching to them, should I rethink that?
  - krobertson 16y ago
    AWS is great if you're small to medium sized. Once you reach a point though, scaling in AWS is difficult. Scaling a database in AWS is difficult, no matter if it is relational or NoSQL. We see boxes with hardly any load get 50% IO wait time and stay there for 20 mins. Try and scale anything when you get that.
sliverstorm 16y ago
It would be great to have my own Linux box always available from anywhere without having to have an extra tower under my desk, but I can't let myself get hooked on it. Even a micro instance, after the free year runs out, costs a decent chunk of change. (Not expensive, just more than I'm willing to pay for a box for flights of fancy)
- cmelbye 16y ago
  You're not going to find much cheaper than $14.60 (the price of keeping a micro instance running for a month.) Rackspace Cloud's 256MB RAM instance is $10.95, and there are probably a few random VPS providers here and there with cheaper servers.
  - dotBen 16y ago
    http://www.lowendbox.com http://www.lowendbox.com - a number of providers are a little shady on there but there are some gems where new VPS providers want to sell loss-leader instances to get traction. You can occasionally get deals for ~$15/year for a *nix VPS, and certainly find something usable for ~$8+/month. EDIT: I wouldn't run anything in production on these boxes, but they are great for dev machines, VPN/SSH proxies for securing open wifi traffic, remote shell, etc.
  - moe 16y ago
    Oh, there is cheaper. E.g. thrustvps.com starts at $5.95 for 512MB. Naturally the number of use-cases where it would make sense to give up the stability of amazon/rackspace in exchange for a saved $5/mo is rather limited.
    - jackowayed 16y ago
      I've had really good luck with thrustvps so far. I found them from lowendbox.com and got 15% off the already-absurd prices forever, so I'm paying $5.06/month for a 512MB box. It's OpenVZ instead of Xen, but I don't really care; I wouldn't really be taking advantage of Xen anyway. (And they have Xen for a couple bucks a month more.) I have no idea how its performance compares to Linode, AWS, etc, but stability has been fine so far, after 3 months. I kind of expected to have downtime by now since it's so cheap, but pingdom tells me there's been none. If you're looking for a cheap VPS so you can run relatively unimportant things (ie. not your startup, unless it's just a side project that isn't bringing you any money yet), it's a good choice.
zmitri 16y ago
Can someone suggest a good AMI to start off with?
- paulofisch 16y ago
  Here's my take on an Ubuntu 10.4 AMI that fits in the free 10GB EBS allowance. http://guru.gg/aether/ubuntu-10-4-amazon-aws-free-tier/ http://guru.gg/aether/ubuntu-10-4-amazon-aws-free-tier/ tl;dr The default AMI's for Ubuntu take 15GB which will cost you $0.50 a month. This is a quick hack to get down to 10GB.
- shaunxcode 16y ago
  not sure what your needs are - for me I wanted the ability to install apache/php5.3 and I was able to do that "out of the box" w/ the first 32 bit ami image w/ sudo yum install httpd.i386 php.i386. I was pretty stoked about that!
sagarun 16y ago
I will test and try Fedora 14 http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_14_on_EC2 http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_14_on_EC2 :D. My first cloud experience. Thanks HN for the reminder.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]

50 points by OoTheNigerian 16y ago

Will you be porting your apps? I am wondering how this will affect developer friendly hosts like Linode.

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to get in on this. I signed up for an AWS account right after micro instances launched. Yet, when I looked at them I realized they weren't as cheap as I initially thought (I had assumed the reserved instance fee covered you as your entire cost for the whole year). I didn't ever use it, but doing so made me ineligible for this. Emailed amazon twice. Very strict on brand new accounts only.

singer 16y ago

More info: http://aws.amazon.com/free http://aws.amazon.com/free

cperciva 16y ago

Related reminder: AWS free Data Transfer In has ended effective today (unless it gets extended again).

lsc 16y ago

>I am wondering how this will affect developer friendly hosts like Linode. I don't know... but I got a whole lot of signups after posting on the other thread about this, so I suspect it will have less of an impact than I originally feared.

ido 16y ago
I use prgmr & slicehost and just signed up for aws. I intend to use s3 to lighten up to load on my bandwidth limits by hosting the largest static files (media files in my case) there, but plan on remaining with the VPSs for all the rest.

cmelbye 16y ago

I'm not porting existing apps, but I'm using this as an opportunity to start a new one on a fresh system with a ton of tools available.

krobertson 16y ago

My fear is more how this will affect others already on AWS. More network latency issues? More EBS latency? Even though it is small, a large number of small users could only add to the problems others are feeling.

cloudwalking 16y ago
Are you unhappy with AWS? I was considering switching to them, should I rethink that?
- krobertson 16y ago
  AWS is great if you're small to medium sized. Once you reach a point though, scaling in AWS is difficult. Scaling a database in AWS is difficult, no matter if it is relational or NoSQL. We see boxes with hardly any load get 50% IO wait time and stay there for 20 mins. Try and scale anything when you get that.

sliverstorm 16y ago

It would be great to have my own Linux box always available from anywhere without having to have an extra tower under my desk, but I can't let myself get hooked on it. Even a micro instance, after the free year runs out, costs a decent chunk of change. (Not expensive, just more than I'm willing to pay for a box for flights of fancy)

cmelbye 16y ago
You're not going to find much cheaper than $14.60 (the price of keeping a micro instance running for a month.) Rackspace Cloud's 256MB RAM instance is $10.95, and there are probably a few random VPS providers here and there with cheaper servers.
- dotBen 16y ago
  http://www.lowendbox.com http://www.lowendbox.com - a number of providers are a little shady on there but there are some gems where new VPS providers want to sell loss-leader instances to get traction. You can occasionally get deals for ~$15/year for a *nix VPS, and certainly find something usable for ~$8+/month. EDIT: I wouldn't run anything in production on these boxes, but they are great for dev machines, VPN/SSH proxies for securing open wifi traffic, remote shell, etc.
- moe 16y ago
  Oh, there is cheaper. E.g. thrustvps.com starts at $5.95 for 512MB. Naturally the number of use-cases where it would make sense to give up the stability of amazon/rackspace in exchange for a saved $5/mo is rather limited.
  - jackowayed 16y ago
    I've had really good luck with thrustvps so far. I found them from lowendbox.com and got 15% off the already-absurd prices forever, so I'm paying $5.06/month for a 512MB box. It's OpenVZ instead of Xen, but I don't really care; I wouldn't really be taking advantage of Xen anyway. (And they have Xen for a couple bucks a month more.) I have no idea how its performance compares to Linode, AWS, etc, but stability has been fine so far, after 3 months. I kind of expected to have downtime by now since it's so cheap, but pingdom tells me there's been none. If you're looking for a cheap VPS so you can run relatively unimportant things (ie. not your startup, unless it's just a side project that isn't bringing you any money yet), it's a good choice.

zmitri 16y ago

Can someone suggest a good AMI to start off with?

paulofisch 16y ago
Here's my take on an Ubuntu 10.4 AMI that fits in the free 10GB EBS allowance. http://guru.gg/aether/ubuntu-10-4-amazon-aws-free-tier/ http://guru.gg/aether/ubuntu-10-4-amazon-aws-free-tier/ tl;dr The default AMI's for Ubuntu take 15GB which will cost you $0.50 a month. This is a quick hack to get down to 10GB.
shaunxcode 16y ago
not sure what your needs are - for me I wanted the ability to install apache/php5.3 and I was able to do that "out of the box" w/ the first 32 bit ami image w/ sudo yum install httpd.i386 php.i386. I was pretty stoked about that!

sagarun 16y ago

I will test and try Fedora 14 http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_14_on_EC2 http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_14_on_EC2 :D. My first cloud experience. Thanks HN for the reminder.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]