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Over the weekend a coworker was helping someone in our lab prepare data for an important conference talk. We accidentally ran up a rather large bill because wh

• matsz 2y ago
  This is precisely why I stick to dedicated servers for my own personal projects. $40/month for a machine, doesn't get any more predictable than this.
  • baobabKoodaa 2y ago
    If you rent a dedicated server from AWS, you will be hit for various additional fees which will likely dwarf that $40/month. So the issue here is not really shared vs dedicated instances. The issue here is that a particular cloud provider (namely AWS) has set up an opaque fee structure.
    • drdaeman 2y ago
      > If you rent a dedicated server from AWS Who, in their right mind, goes for a bare metal to AWS, when there are so many decent and time-tested options out there?
      • jedberg 2y ago
        Data Gravity. If you already have all your data in AWS, and your app that is generating new data is in AWS, it makes a lot of sense to get bare metal in AWS to do batch workloads on that data, so there is no egress fees.
        • benterix 2y ago
          We did a calculation in my previous company and it turned out even with the egregious egress costs it was way cheaper to host these huge workloads outside of AWS.
      • smabie 2y ago
        crypto hft
      • mywittyname 2y ago
        Anyone who has experience with AWS or is looking to hire candidates with known skills. AWS is the industry standard. A lot of quality candidates know it and use it, because it pays the best and has the most job opportunities. And most companies use it because they were first to market and its easy to find candidates. I'd argue that startups should have a good reason for not using AWS. The costs for their basic services is not that much compared to the cost of development.
    • ElevenLathe 2y ago
      In my experience, when people say "dedicated server" they typically mean something like OVH rather than a real "cloud" provider (AWS, GCP, Azure, etc.). In other words, something morally equivalent to colo but without having to ship servers around.
      • baobabKoodaa 2y ago
        Yes, that is likely the case here as well. But if someone is not well versed in cloud providers and reads these comments, they might be misinformed without clarifying that this issue is AWS vs other providers, as opposed to dedicated vs shared resources.
    • matsz 2y ago
      Oh no, I would never go AWS for dedicated. Should've specified that in my comment so people don't get disappointed if they try to get that from AWS.
    • oooyay 2y ago
      I suspect they're not getting a dedicated server from Amazon. Anyone doing that is either foolish or is so locked into AWS infrastructure that it cost-wise makes more sense than to expand a network to another provider. Fun times, indeed. What I started doing is just running my own "cloud" out of my house for personal projects. I have all of the things I need. There's some overhead in terms of maintenance and up-front setup cost in terms of time and equipment, but after that it's pretty smooth sailing.
      • whiplash451 2y ago
        You still have network performance limitations + the security aspects to run by yourself (as in: not getting your data drive encrypted by a ransomware)
        • oooyay 2y ago
          I probably wasn't explicit enough with "cloud" but I mean running your own isolated workloads with at minimum virtual machines and virtual isolated storage (block or otherwise). From a topological perspective my home DC resembles most major clouds other than the fact that there are not two sites.
      • yolovoe 2y ago
        > I suspect they're not getting a dedicated server from Amazon. If it's literally called a dedicated server, why would you suspect otherwise? Source: I worked in the core EC2 dataplane for a couple years. PEs and leadership there would not be happy with misleading customers. We constantly thought of the customer experience there.
        • oooyay 2y ago
          Generally you get a "dedicated host" from AWS, not a "dedicated server" so that was kind of my first tip off. There's a very big difference; the only usecase I'd really consider for dedicated hosts is security related and, frankly, they're far more expensive than any colo box. Dedicated Hosts are also far more restrictive than what you get at a colo DC. Second, even if AWS offered to let you have full control of a rack box you'd have to be economically out of your mind with AWS' network costs compared to a colo DC.
    • whiplash451 2y ago
      You can get much cheaper dedicated servers with alternative providers such as OVH.
  • zeroxfe 2y ago
    There's no way you're getting a machine for $40/month. :-) Did you mean a dedicated VM or VPS? (I have a bunch of actual dedicated machines with different providers, and this would save me a lot of money.) (Edit: holy moly those prices are fantastic!)
    • distantsounds 2y ago
      OVH and Hetzner have offerings at that price range. you can use a tool like serverhunter.com to find all sorts of economically-priced servers.
      • matsz 2y ago
        Yep, I'm renting two servers from Hetzner; have one in Germany and another in Finland. Both cheap (€40/month) and over the few years I've been using their services, I have nothing to complain about.
        • deleted 2y ago
          [deleted]
      • Scarbutt 2y ago
        Does OVH asks for passport verification too, like Hetzner?
        • HeatrayEnjoyer 2y ago
          Why would they ask for a passport? Many people don't even have one.
          • Scarbutt 2y ago
            The worst part is they ask for it after you have enter your credit card details. Maybe they have policies per geographic region for this.
    • javchz 2y ago
• rco8786 2y ago
  > AWS' entire business model is making the pricing so confusing My go to line here is that Cloud was a ZIRP. Like the whole entire thing. Took us ~10 years to wind up the cloud, and it will take years to unwind it, but the mass migration away is already happening. To be clear, I don't mean like AWS is going out of business or anything. Just that companies are a) realizing how insanely expensive it is, b) realizing how wildly volatile the pricing is, and c) starting to reach for services with transparent, fixed pricing
  • brigadier132 2y ago
    I don't think people understand how absurd egress costs are. I was talking with some people in game dev because im making a multiplayer game and i wanted to understand what my future costs would be. Bandwidth was #1 over compute.
    • apitman 2y ago
      I've done a decent amount of research on the cheapest VPS providers for network-heavy applications. Take a look at Hetzner and OVH if you haven't already. Also here's a useful comparison: https://getdeploying.com/reference/data-egress https://getdeploying.com/reference/data-egress
    • bauruine 2y ago
      Yeah it's more than absurd. I have a rented server that does 230TB egress a month. That's 4710$ in AWS egress fees (0.02$ per GB). I pay 40 Euros or about 0.0002 per GB and that includes an AMD Ryzen 5 3600 with 64GB RAM.
      • apitman 2y ago
        May I ask who your provider is?
        • bauruine 2y ago
          That's https://mevspace.com/ https://mevspace.com/ but hetzner, scaleway, ovh, psychz.net, reliablesite.net etc. have similar pricing. If you increase your budget to 100 there are many, many more in Europe and the US.
• ryandrake 2y ago
  > It seems like AWS' entire business model is making the pricing so confusing that you don't know what it will cost until after you've used it. It feels weirdly similar to the US healthcare/insurance situation. Not just the healthcare situation, but everything. There's nothing much more stereotypically American than "not knowing what you're going to pay for something until you're billed." Dozens of little fees on your cable or ISP bill, resort fees in hotels, service charges on your restaurant bill, fees on car rentals, fees from your bank when you so much as breathe on your account, and of course sales taxes which for some reason are never listed on the tag in any store.
  • doctorpangloss 2y ago
    People complain about this relentlessly, but never change. Additionally, every single business owner I know complains that whatever it is they're selling, (1) it isn't worth the brain damage to sell to customers looking for the lowest price, (2) as long as people comparison shop in a harebrained way, hook pricing (aka up front pricing that looks low and turns out high) is only rational. It's not like they're providing a bad service for the cost.
    • pixl97 2y ago
      I mean this is why a lot of first world countries have consumer protections that demands the retailer/service publishes prices up front. Course in the US there is quite a counter lobbyist group that prevents just that from happening.
    • thfuran 2y ago
      >hook pricing (aka up front pricing that looks low and turns out high) is only rational. Yes, many deceptive business practices are rational acts on the part of the businesses. That doesn't mean they should be tolerated.
      • thaumaturgy 2y ago
        I have begun to think of this as a "large population error", and I'm noticing it in a lot of different markets. At small scales, annoying your customers is bad business. You only need to lose a few before it begins to hurt. Customer complaints are more likely to be a consideration in business decisions. At larger scales, a business can begin to preferentially adopt practices intended to drive away some customers. Perhaps you don't want the "pathological" customers, to borrow one of Patrick McKenzie's terms. You can make more money with less effort by being more selective about your customers. At extremely large scales, you largely stop thinking about groups of customers altogether. All of your decisions are driven by aggregates -- did all sales go up this quarter, or down? The effort required to do a deep dive into the behaviors and preferences of any individual market segment may not make sense anymore on a quarterly basis. At this scale, you might be able to afford to annoy tens of thousands of customers and still have a very nice graph next quarter. So, when someone says a business practice shouldn't be "tolerated", that's a perfectly reasonable position, except it doesn't actually work for businesses operating at extremely large scales. It's too difficult for customers to organize a protest in a way that will influence that business's decision-making. So much business has moved online in the last 20 years, while the US has leveled off at 80% urbanization over the same time period, along with more and more businesses congealing into BigCos, combined with the recent domination of private equity: lots and lots of things are now operating at a scale where customer concerns just aren't a part of the business model anymore. Coffee shops, fast food, big-box retail, online retail, SaaS, PaaS: all of these can thrive while running on exorbitant pricing and abusive customer policies, because their volume of customers is so large that it's nearly impossible to be so bad that you'll piss off enough customers to impact your decision-making. (Unless you're Sony.)
• dheera 2y ago
  We really need laws that allow customers to set a legally-binding max spend per month on any service, after which it's upto the company to suspend services. This should apply to everything -- cloud compute, healthcare, phone bills, internet services, everything.
  • sieabahlpark 2y ago
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  • balls187 2y ago
    You sort of have that already in the US for health, its tied to your insurance and its called max out of pocket. Of course it only applies to covered services, and insurance companies and medical providers don't necessarily make it simple to know what is and is not covered (though it IS improving). If you plan on seeking medical services without going through insurance, the ACA requires providers to provide you with a good faith estimate upfront.
    • dheera 2y ago
      > its tied to your insurance and its called max out of pocket F that, if I paid for insurance I shouldn't have to pay anything out of pocket > If you plan on seeking medical services without going through insurance, the ACA requires providers to provide you with a good faith estimate upfront. F that, if there is any out of pocket payments at all, I should be entitled to estimates even WITH insurance and they should be legally mandated to be within 5% of the actual cost.
      • balls187 2y ago
        > F that, if I paid for insurance I shouldn't have to pay anything out of pocket That's not how insurance works, bud. For one, you likely don't pay for insurance, its heavily subsidized by your employer, and they will determine which policies to offer you. For two, you share the risk with everyone else who has a policy with your provider. I could see an argument for insurance companies being legislated to force them to cover more previously uncovered services, as the ACA did. > F that, if there is any out of pocket payments at all, I should be entitled to estimates even WITH insurance and they should be legally mandated to be within 5% of the actual cost. Sure, you are welcome to contact your insurance BEFORE you obtain services and find out what they will cover. In fact, its incumbent upon you to do that, and not expect HCP's to do that for you.
• superfrank 2y ago
  > It seems like AWS' entire business model is making the pricing so confusing that you don't know what it will cost until after you've used it. Maybe I'm naive, but I don't think that's intentional. I think it's just a byproduct of trying to build something that works for everyone and every use case. As you make your target market bigger and bigger, you continually hit edge case after edge case that you try and solve with "just one more" rule or option. Eventually the system becomes so complex that no layman can understand it.
  • tjoff 2y ago
    That would make some sense if the edge-cases didnt have 10.000% margin.
    • superfrank 2y ago
      I've worked at companies that were spending 6 figures a month on AWS and we had dedicated AWS employees who helped us understand our bill and keep pricing in check. We also had GCP and Azure reps constantly reaching out to see if they could win us over by showing us how they could lower our bill. Overcharging enterprise customers for things they're not using is actually a risk to AWS as it gives customers a reason to jump ship. The whales on AWS aren't overspending because AWS uses the granularity of their billing to make sure they aren't. That's how they keep the whales happy. For the little guys, I'm not even sure it's worth AWS's time to nickel and dime them. AWS hands out thousands to ten of thousands of dollars in credits like candy. I'm pretty sure it's more important to them to lock in whales when they're still minnows than to bilk an extra $500 a year out of a 10 person start up.
      • Hikikomori 2y ago
        Idk about that, it becomes worse at larger scales. We're at 7 figures weekly with obscene amounts of waste. But at that scale it's like hundreds of Aws bills to understand.
        • okrad 2y ago
• thefourthchime 2y ago
  The other way EFS will bite you is if you don't have enough provisioning and you push changes to prod that make it throttle to a point where it doesn't work and then you're making emergency changes from a hotel room on vacation. I don't think that's AWS explicit business model, but I think they're perfectly fine with it happening.
• balls187 2y ago
  > It seems like AWS' entire business model is making the pricing so confusing that you don't know what it will cost until after you've used it. Complicated cost calculations are only a part of the issue. You (or your team) also have fault in that you did not take the time to understand the costs associated with your decisions and not utilize AWS cost management capabilities (that is assuming you did get a surprise bill in lieu of an alert saying you hit a budget threshold). And that is in part due to the shift from having dedicated ops teams, to having programmers take on more infrastructure tasks. This isn't unique or novel--incorrectly configured buckets, committing access keys, poor IAM setup, etc happen so frequently due to devs who have no real practical experience managing production infrastructure having unchecked access to AWS.
  • robertlagrant 2y ago
    Well, all the infra people did this too, just earlier.
• inkyoto 2y ago
  > It seems like AWS' entire business model is making the pricing so confusing that you don't know what it will cost until after you've used it. This is patently not true. AWS is very transparent with the pricing and offers a cost calculator. Specifically for EFS, you could have used the EFS service cost calculator before setting off with your endeavours: https://calculator.aws/#/createCalculator/EFS https://calculator.aws/#/createCalculator/EFS Other services are available at https://calculator.aws/ https://calculator.aws/ Any work on any cloud platform has an imperative step: the cost analysis. Once constituents of the solution are finalised (step 1), it is compulsory to proceed to step 2: estimate the charges it is going to cost and decide whether it is affordable or not. Skipping the step 2 and blaming the cloud platform provider business model is not fair and is akin to overspending on a credit card and blaming the credit card issuer for allowing you to do it. Cloud is not dissimilar from UNIX/Linux – both give one a large variety of elaborate footguns to shoot oneself with, and if they worked as root on a software development project on a UNIX/Linux box and accidentally wiped the root file system out, who is to blame? Since cloud charges are usage based («pay as you go»), the cost estimate is a requisite that can't be avoided unless the budget is unlimited.
  • gjs278 2y ago
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