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I run a million-dollar business on it for $4500/m, give or take. It's not Webfaction (who I love and highly recommend) or Linode. It's virtualized data-center t

I run a million-dollar business on it for $4500/m, give or take. It's not Webfaction (who I love and highly recommend) or Linode. It's virtualized data-center territory that can support some massive stacks. They give you enough rope to hang yourself. I'm ok with that, because it works brilliantly when you have the time to put in to it. (They also almost always help out or completely forgive someone that accidentally ran up a massive bill in a short period of time.) Without AWS, my company wouldn't exist - I could never have initially afforded dedicated hosting or collocation. AWS changed the game. You can argue they're not the cheapest or even the best anymore, but it works this way because of Amazon. Edit: what's with the down-votes?

oafitupa 12y ago
What's your point? What you said changes nothing for people like tieTYT and me.
- themartorana 12y ago
  If you want to play with VPS servers, use DO. If you want to virtualize a data-center or series of globally-connected data centers with racks of servers, use AWS. So maybe AWS isn't the right solution for you. You say in another comment that warnings about billing overages aren't enough. AWS can't hold your hand and provide Netflix-capable services at the same time. Amazon chose the latter. I would recommend you not choose AWS until you have the time to dedicate to it.
  - oafitupa 12y ago
    How is being able to set up a $ limit "holding my hand"? You guys are defending something that is indefensible. I don't want to "play" with VPS servers, I want to work knowing that I won't go bankrupt just because I'm using at the same time a service that won't let me set up a limit, and a pull payment system (ie. credit cards, as opposed to push systems like Bitcoin).
    - politician 12y ago
      Can you use a pre-paid credit card with Amazon? (Not that that would absolve you of owing the balance - but they might halt your account for lack of payment and prevent further charges from accruing).
      - ivanhoe 12y ago
        AWS charges are monthly so it won't help much (also they don't immediately pull the plug, they send you the email warning first). One just needs to setup the alarms and pay attention when deploying a new code. It sounds far more scary than it really is.
    - mentat 12y ago
      If you don't want to bankrupt yourself then check your usage every day or hour. It's still your responsibility not your vendor's.
      - oafitupa 12y ago
        Like it or not this is a problem many of us have, and are avoiding AWS for that sole reason. You can keep blaming the victim, or you can accept not being able to set up a limit is a usability problem. It's like saying "this website is stupid, it's storing passwords in plaintext", and you answering "hurr, it's the user's responsibility to create and manage cryptographically secure passwords".
        jalfresi 12y ago
        You're not a victim! Youre inability to control your costs, given the tools, alarms and general common sense doesn't entitle you to some magic off button! Learn to use the tools appropriately and you won't incur unexpected costs. And as an analogy, Aws is more like C; if you are willing to put the time in to learn, you can do some amazing things that are impossible with other providers. But you must take responsibility for them.
        12y ago
  - blibble 12y ago
    you could protect yourself by setting up a limited liability company (cost in the uk is about £14), then your assets aren't at risk if something goes very very wrong... Amazon probably should do a credit check before offering thousands of pounds in credit... (I am not a lawyer and this should not be taken as legal advice)
- e40 12y ago
  Perhaps you missed this part: (They also almost always help out or completely forgive someone that accidentally ran up a massive bill in a short period of time.)
  - oafitupa 12y ago
    I addressed that in other comment: I don't want to have to rely on that. For starters, there is no real data about that, just anecdotes. How do I know they will reimburse non-US customers too? Many companies have that policy: They protect US customers because they can sue them, but people from other countries can only complain on the internet.
    - eropple 12y ago
      Then you can wire up a CloudWatch alarm to burn everything down, just like you want, without Amazon doing a thing. But, and I don't say this lightly, your behavior in this thread makes me think you just want to complain.
seunosewa 12y ago
You could have afforded VPS hosting in the beginning (starts from $20 per month for decent specs), and immediately switched to dedicated hosting once you outgrew the VPS (from $100 per month). AWS was never the cheapest for any given level of performance; you've always paid a huge premium for rarely needed flexibility.
- themartorana 12y ago
  I would argue the "rarely needed flexibility" - our traffic is very spiky, and we scale from 3 to 11 or even 13 front-end instances between our lowest and peak usage. If I had to maintain all that hardware capacity for 10% of the day, it would be more costly. Then there are the ancillary benefits - I can lose a server and another is in its place, attached properly to the stack within 60 seconds. I can take advantage of compute power when I need. I don't have to run nginx or haproxy for load balancing (and I don't have to manage the load balancer servers) and spinning up an identical stack in Europe or Asia is a single command line statement away. Also I'm not a server admin by trade. So I realize there are scenarios where bare metal could be cheaper, but the opportunity and admin costs need to be factored as well.
  - vidarh 12y ago
    Traffic that spiky is extremely unusual. But you don't need to maintain all that hardware capacity for 10% of the day. There are a number of colo providers that also provide managed hosting and cloud services (even if you for some reason couldn't deal with the latency of simply tieing EC2 instances into a colocated or managed hosting stack via a tunnel). In fact, combine, and you can cut the hosting costs even more than with colo services alone, since you don't need to plan for a low duty cycle for the hardware - you can run things on 90%+ load (or wherever your sweet spot turns out to be) under normal circumstances and fire up cloud instances for the spikes. That method handles the loss of servers etc. as well just fine, again further cutting the cost of a colo/managed hosting setup because you can plan for less redundancy. Personally I've yet to work on any setup where the admin costs of an AWS setup has been nearly enough lower than colo or managed hosting to eat much into the premium you're paying. You have 90% of the sys-admin hassles anyway, and you're left with far less possibility of tuning your setup to what works best with your setup. Most of the setups I've worked on come out somewhere between 1/3 to 1/2 of the cost of running the same setup purely on AWS. Sometimes the gap is smaller if you have really spiky traffic or have lots of background processing or one off jobs where you can e.g. use spot instances extensively. I do understand people wanting to pay to not have to think about these things, though. But you're almost certainly paying a steep premium for it, even with your traffic spikes.
IkmoIkmo 12y ago
On a sidenote, what's your business?

oafitupa 12y ago

What's your point? What you said changes nothing for people like tieTYT and me.

themartorana 12y ago
If you want to play with VPS servers, use DO. If you want to virtualize a data-center or series of globally-connected data centers with racks of servers, use AWS. So maybe AWS isn't the right solution for you. You say in another comment that warnings about billing overages aren't enough. AWS can't hold your hand and provide Netflix-capable services at the same time. Amazon chose the latter. I would recommend you not choose AWS until you have the time to dedicate to it.
- oafitupa 12y ago
  How is being able to set up a $ limit "holding my hand"? You guys are defending something that is indefensible. I don't want to "play" with VPS servers, I want to work knowing that I won't go bankrupt just because I'm using at the same time a service that won't let me set up a limit, and a pull payment system (ie. credit cards, as opposed to push systems like Bitcoin).
  - politician 12y ago
    Can you use a pre-paid credit card with Amazon? (Not that that would absolve you of owing the balance - but they might halt your account for lack of payment and prevent further charges from accruing).
    - ivanhoe 12y ago
      AWS charges are monthly so it won't help much (also they don't immediately pull the plug, they send you the email warning first). One just needs to setup the alarms and pay attention when deploying a new code. It sounds far more scary than it really is.
  - mentat 12y ago
    If you don't want to bankrupt yourself then check your usage every day or hour. It's still your responsibility not your vendor's.
    - oafitupa 12y ago
      Like it or not this is a problem many of us have, and are avoiding AWS for that sole reason. You can keep blaming the victim, or you can accept not being able to set up a limit is a usability problem. It's like saying "this website is stupid, it's storing passwords in plaintext", and you answering "hurr, it's the user's responsibility to create and manage cryptographically secure passwords".
      - jalfresi 12y ago
        You're not a victim! Youre inability to control your costs, given the tools, alarms and general common sense doesn't entitle you to some magic off button! Learn to use the tools appropriately and you won't incur unexpected costs. And as an analogy, Aws is more like C; if you are willing to put the time in to learn, you can do some amazing things that are impossible with other providers. But you must take responsibility for them.
        12y ago
- blibble 12y ago
  you could protect yourself by setting up a limited liability company (cost in the uk is about £14), then your assets aren't at risk if something goes very very wrong... Amazon probably should do a credit check before offering thousands of pounds in credit... (I am not a lawyer and this should not be taken as legal advice)
e40 12y ago
Perhaps you missed this part: (They also almost always help out or completely forgive someone that accidentally ran up a massive bill in a short period of time.)
- oafitupa 12y ago
  I addressed that in other comment: I don't want to have to rely on that. For starters, there is no real data about that, just anecdotes. How do I know they will reimburse non-US customers too? Many companies have that policy: They protect US customers because they can sue them, but people from other countries can only complain on the internet.
  - eropple 12y ago
    Then you can wire up a CloudWatch alarm to burn everything down, just like you want, without Amazon doing a thing. But, and I don't say this lightly, your behavior in this thread makes me think you just want to complain.

seunosewa 12y ago

You could have afforded VPS hosting in the beginning (starts from $20 per month for decent specs), and immediately switched to dedicated hosting once you outgrew the VPS (from $100 per month). AWS was never the cheapest for any given level of performance; you've always paid a huge premium for rarely needed flexibility.

themartorana 12y ago
I would argue the "rarely needed flexibility" - our traffic is very spiky, and we scale from 3 to 11 or even 13 front-end instances between our lowest and peak usage. If I had to maintain all that hardware capacity for 10% of the day, it would be more costly. Then there are the ancillary benefits - I can lose a server and another is in its place, attached properly to the stack within 60 seconds. I can take advantage of compute power when I need. I don't have to run nginx or haproxy for load balancing (and I don't have to manage the load balancer servers) and spinning up an identical stack in Europe or Asia is a single command line statement away. Also I'm not a server admin by trade. So I realize there are scenarios where bare metal could be cheaper, but the opportunity and admin costs need to be factored as well.
- vidarh 12y ago
  Traffic that spiky is extremely unusual. But you don't need to maintain all that hardware capacity for 10% of the day. There are a number of colo providers that also provide managed hosting and cloud services (even if you for some reason couldn't deal with the latency of simply tieing EC2 instances into a colocated or managed hosting stack via a tunnel). In fact, combine, and you can cut the hosting costs even more than with colo services alone, since you don't need to plan for a low duty cycle for the hardware - you can run things on 90%+ load (or wherever your sweet spot turns out to be) under normal circumstances and fire up cloud instances for the spikes. That method handles the loss of servers etc. as well just fine, again further cutting the cost of a colo/managed hosting setup because you can plan for less redundancy. Personally I've yet to work on any setup where the admin costs of an AWS setup has been nearly enough lower than colo or managed hosting to eat much into the premium you're paying. You have 90% of the sys-admin hassles anyway, and you're left with far less possibility of tuning your setup to what works best with your setup. Most of the setups I've worked on come out somewhere between 1/3 to 1/2 of the cost of running the same setup purely on AWS. Sometimes the gap is smaller if you have really spiky traffic or have lots of background processing or one off jobs where you can e.g. use spot instances extensively. I do understand people wanting to pay to not have to think about these things, though. But you're almost certainly paying a steep premium for it, even with your traffic spikes.

IkmoIkmo 12y ago

On a sidenote, what's your business?