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Hell, even without making the mistake of publishing keys, I've accidentally run up quite large bills for Amazon services; backups that failed to remove old copi

Hell, even without making the mistake of publishing keys, I've accidentally run up quite large bills for Amazon services; backups that failed to remove old copies was a big one. Instances that were supposed to have been shut down, but for some reason it didn't happen (I don't know if this is my mistake or a bug at Amazon...probably my mistake). I've simply stopped using Amazon for anything tinkery, because the costs of making mistakes can be tremendous. At least when I make mistakes on my own colocated server, I know it can never cost me more than the $100/month I pay to host it. And, storage is practically infinite (4TB hard disks), and I can spin up more VMs than I would ever need for tinkering in 32GB of RAM on our "spare" server. And, when I have needed to use VM with some cloud host...Linode and Digital Ocean and similar may have dramatically smaller toolsets for managing virtual resources than Amazon (probably unworkably so for large deployments), but my mind has a much easier time predicting costs than with Amazon. After being surprised on more than one occasion with a ~$300 bill from Amazon (for running nothing but personal pet projects with no economic return), I turned everything off.

mhink 12y ago
Something similar has happened to me, on a smaller scale. I was recently checking my bank account, and noticed a charge from AWS for something like $15. After further investigation, I had apparently been charged this $15 for about 6 months. Hmm. Logging into AWS and checking the Cost Explorer showed that I had been charged for a t1.small EC2 instance I had running, but when I logged into the AWS console, all I saw was a single "stopped" instance. There's no way I was being charged for cycles I'm not using, right? Turns out that the instance I was being charged for was in us-west, and I had only been looking at us-east- and there is no indication within the actual EC2 panel that you have instances in other regions! I was a bit perturbed, to say the least...
- fletchowns 12y ago
  Not sure why you didn't click on "Billing & Cost Management" where you can see a complete breakdown (by resource and region) of exactly what you are being charged for.
  - SwellJoe 12y ago
    I don't know about the previous commenter, and I don't know if the tools have improved, but when I tried to use the billing and cost management page, I couldn't figure out what was actually costing so much. It broke it down into (EC2, S3, etc.), but I couldn't figure out how that mapped out to the bill (i.e. was it the snapshots of my instances, the storage for the not running instances, the old backups in S3, etc.). It didn't seem like it was telling me "exactly" what I was being charged for. For me, when I saw a $300 bill for one running EC2 instance, a couple of halted ones, and a few hundred GB of storage for something I thought of as a "toy" project that I didn't want to invest serious time or money in, I knew I was done with AWS. A small colocated server could readily provide those resources for vastly less money (and I work on tools to manage cloud and VM resources, including a reasonably good API for spinning them up and down and such, so I don't really miss the Amazon API or UI). This was after I'd already gotten a shock from an automated backup gone wrong that ran up a huge bill. So, it took me a couple of times getting burned. Of course, it's always been my fault for not understanding how Amazon bills for things, what services cost money (i.e. a down instance still costs money), how much things cost, and sometimes how the API works (or at least confirming that it's doing what I think it's doing, in the case of removing old backups). I'm not blaming Amazon. I'm just saying, I don't trust myself to use Amazon for anything that I'm not going to spend a lot of time and energy on, because I'm obviously not capable of using it without making mistakes when I treat it like a toy. I readily admit I shot myself in the foot; Amazon just provided the guns.
    - bjt 12y ago
      The whole billing/cost section got big improvements last year.
- thoman23 12y ago
  Almost the exact same story here. I never thought to change the region to see what was causing a $3 charge every month, and at $3 I didn't have the energy to investigate further until about a year of needling frustration built up and I reached out to Amazon support directly and they clued me in. Years later I'm using AWS professionally, and it all seems easy now. But when you are first introduced to AWS and want to kick the tires on a toy project, it can be confusing and overwhelming.
- billyhoffman 12y ago
  +1 on this. I have several instances running in US East and Ireland. When you login it just shows the instances for 1 region (usually us-east) and I have a quick "oh shit" moment wondering what happened to the Ireland servers. The AWAS EC2 console really needs a way to show all instances.
ryanfitz 12y ago
When I setup an AWS account for pet projects the very first thing I do is create a billing alarm that alerts me the second my bill goes above $0. This way if something is accidentally running without my knowledge, ill get an alert (email / sms) and can quickly take action.
DevFactor 12y ago
For applications I've opted to use Heroku due to its simplicity when compared to EC2. I'm still working out the static storage though. I was impressed by Amazon customer support, so I may stay around. Simply renting a VPS somewhere is another option.
sciurus 12y ago
You can set up billing alerts so that you're notified if your AWS bill crosses a threshold. http://docs.aws.amazon.com/awsaccountbilling/latest/aboutv2/create-billing-alarm.html http://docs.aws.amazon.com/awsaccountbilling/latest/aboutv2/...
fat0wl 12y ago
are there any major companies providing co-location or is it kindof a diverse scene? im curious about it but only really know about cloud VM... basically just looking for a site where i can read about one of these services / pricing plan. my main questions are about bandwidth -- for one company i freelance for, the majority portion of their bill is s3 IO and it would be huge for them to get to a capped pricing model even if speed suffers tried googling but it doesnt seem so straight-forward... i like the idea though.
- SwellJoe 12y ago
  Colo can be confusing. There are large companies that have their own data centers (sometimes dozens of data centers) and many small companies that often bundle and re-sell services. I currently use CoreXchange, which is now owned by Zayo. I chose them partly because they are pretty close to me; I'm in Austin, the data center I'm hosted in is in Dallas. They have pretty clear pricing on their website and their connectivity and service is good and fast. But, there are many, many, good providers out there. I would check in your area (assuming you're in an area that has good backbone access; most large cities do), first. There are cheaper providers and more expensive providers...sometimes, it can be hard to tell whether you get what you pay for, without actually trying it. But, most of the big colo providers have been discussed online at Web Hosting Talk or other places. When getting new service, I usually check WHT first for deals in my local area in a good data centers. Sometimes, for low bandwidth (where low bandwidth may mean something still kinda huge, like several terabytes of transfer per month) a reseller may be the best deal. Sometimes, going straight to the provider is the best choice. I ended up a CoreXchange by way of a deal from ColoUnlimited. The good thing about going this route is that ongoing costs are somewhat lower, generally speaking, though up front costs are much higher (~$3000 for a server, for example). And, costs can be predicted with high precision. You can simply say, "I want this much bandwidth." and that's what they'll give you and bill you for. You're pretty much just paying for power and bandwidth when you're in a colo; all the other stuff is up to you (hardware upgrades, replacements, etc. either need to be done via shipping gear in and out or by going on-site to make the changes). The bad thing about going this route is that it's all on you. This isn't "managed" hosting (though they do have staff on-hand, and you can usually pay for "remote hands" to handle system upgrades and such, it tends to be very pricey for anything more than simple reboots). And, scaling is non-trivial. In the bad old days, if you had a site get crazy popular overnight, you had to figure out how to get more servers online on short notice...maybe missing an opportunity to grow and blowing your shot at a good first impression on new users. AWS and other cloud services are much more readily scalable. But, there's no reason you can't build with scaling in mind, and use cloud services for elasticity while using colocated servers for your baseline service. That's how we do for our business stuff. If we suddenly need more servers online, we spin them up via Amazon or Google Compute Engine (the software I work on supports several cloud providers, as well as building cloud infrastructure out of heterogeneous servers, so this is not much different than managing VMs on our own hardware and we can move websites and such back and forth across our own machines and AWS VMs reasonably easily).

mhink 12y ago

Something similar has happened to me, on a smaller scale. I was recently checking my bank account, and noticed a charge from AWS for something like $15. After further investigation, I had apparently been charged this $15 for about 6 months. Hmm. Logging into AWS and checking the Cost Explorer showed that I had been charged for a t1.small EC2 instance I had running, but when I logged into the AWS console, all I saw was a single "stopped" instance. There's no way I was being charged for cycles I'm not using, right? Turns out that the instance I was being charged for was in us-west, and I had only been looking at us-east- and there is no indication within the actual EC2 panel that you have instances in other regions! I was a bit perturbed, to say the least...

fletchowns 12y ago
Not sure why you didn't click on "Billing & Cost Management" where you can see a complete breakdown (by resource and region) of exactly what you are being charged for.
- SwellJoe 12y ago
  I don't know about the previous commenter, and I don't know if the tools have improved, but when I tried to use the billing and cost management page, I couldn't figure out what was actually costing so much. It broke it down into (EC2, S3, etc.), but I couldn't figure out how that mapped out to the bill (i.e. was it the snapshots of my instances, the storage for the not running instances, the old backups in S3, etc.). It didn't seem like it was telling me "exactly" what I was being charged for. For me, when I saw a $300 bill for one running EC2 instance, a couple of halted ones, and a few hundred GB of storage for something I thought of as a "toy" project that I didn't want to invest serious time or money in, I knew I was done with AWS. A small colocated server could readily provide those resources for vastly less money (and I work on tools to manage cloud and VM resources, including a reasonably good API for spinning them up and down and such, so I don't really miss the Amazon API or UI). This was after I'd already gotten a shock from an automated backup gone wrong that ran up a huge bill. So, it took me a couple of times getting burned. Of course, it's always been my fault for not understanding how Amazon bills for things, what services cost money (i.e. a down instance still costs money), how much things cost, and sometimes how the API works (or at least confirming that it's doing what I think it's doing, in the case of removing old backups). I'm not blaming Amazon. I'm just saying, I don't trust myself to use Amazon for anything that I'm not going to spend a lot of time and energy on, because I'm obviously not capable of using it without making mistakes when I treat it like a toy. I readily admit I shot myself in the foot; Amazon just provided the guns.
  - bjt 12y ago
    The whole billing/cost section got big improvements last year.
thoman23 12y ago
Almost the exact same story here. I never thought to change the region to see what was causing a $3 charge every month, and at $3 I didn't have the energy to investigate further until about a year of needling frustration built up and I reached out to Amazon support directly and they clued me in. Years later I'm using AWS professionally, and it all seems easy now. But when you are first introduced to AWS and want to kick the tires on a toy project, it can be confusing and overwhelming.
billyhoffman 12y ago
+1 on this. I have several instances running in US East and Ireland. When you login it just shows the instances for 1 region (usually us-east) and I have a quick "oh shit" moment wondering what happened to the Ireland servers. The AWAS EC2 console really needs a way to show all instances.

ryanfitz 12y ago

When I setup an AWS account for pet projects the very first thing I do is create a billing alarm that alerts me the second my bill goes above $0. This way if something is accidentally running without my knowledge, ill get an alert (email / sms) and can quickly take action.

DevFactor 12y ago

For applications I've opted to use Heroku due to its simplicity when compared to EC2. I'm still working out the static storage though. I was impressed by Amazon customer support, so I may stay around. Simply renting a VPS somewhere is another option.

sciurus 12y ago

You can set up billing alerts so that you're notified if your AWS bill crosses a threshold. http://docs.aws.amazon.com/awsaccountbilling/latest/aboutv2/create-billing-alarm.html http://docs.aws.amazon.com/awsaccountbilling/latest/aboutv2/...

fat0wl 12y ago

are there any major companies providing co-location or is it kindof a diverse scene? im curious about it but only really know about cloud VM... basically just looking for a site where i can read about one of these services / pricing plan. my main questions are about bandwidth -- for one company i freelance for, the majority portion of their bill is s3 IO and it would be huge for them to get to a capped pricing model even if speed suffers tried googling but it doesnt seem so straight-forward... i like the idea though.

SwellJoe 12y ago
Colo can be confusing. There are large companies that have their own data centers (sometimes dozens of data centers) and many small companies that often bundle and re-sell services. I currently use CoreXchange, which is now owned by Zayo. I chose them partly because they are pretty close to me; I'm in Austin, the data center I'm hosted in is in Dallas. They have pretty clear pricing on their website and their connectivity and service is good and fast. But, there are many, many, good providers out there. I would check in your area (assuming you're in an area that has good backbone access; most large cities do), first. There are cheaper providers and more expensive providers...sometimes, it can be hard to tell whether you get what you pay for, without actually trying it. But, most of the big colo providers have been discussed online at Web Hosting Talk or other places. When getting new service, I usually check WHT first for deals in my local area in a good data centers. Sometimes, for low bandwidth (where low bandwidth may mean something still kinda huge, like several terabytes of transfer per month) a reseller may be the best deal. Sometimes, going straight to the provider is the best choice. I ended up a CoreXchange by way of a deal from ColoUnlimited. The good thing about going this route is that ongoing costs are somewhat lower, generally speaking, though up front costs are much higher (~$3000 for a server, for example). And, costs can be predicted with high precision. You can simply say, "I want this much bandwidth." and that's what they'll give you and bill you for. You're pretty much just paying for power and bandwidth when you're in a colo; all the other stuff is up to you (hardware upgrades, replacements, etc. either need to be done via shipping gear in and out or by going on-site to make the changes). The bad thing about going this route is that it's all on you. This isn't "managed" hosting (though they do have staff on-hand, and you can usually pay for "remote hands" to handle system upgrades and such, it tends to be very pricey for anything more than simple reboots). And, scaling is non-trivial. In the bad old days, if you had a site get crazy popular overnight, you had to figure out how to get more servers online on short notice...maybe missing an opportunity to grow and blowing your shot at a good first impression on new users. AWS and other cloud services are much more readily scalable. But, there's no reason you can't build with scaling in mind, and use cloud services for elasticity while using colocated servers for your baseline service. That's how we do for our business stuff. If we suddenly need more servers online, we spin them up via Amazon or Google Compute Engine (the software I work on supports several cloud providers, as well as building cloud infrastructure out of heterogeneous servers, so this is not much different than managing VMs on our own hardware and we can move websites and such back and forth across our own machines and AWS VMs reasonably easily).