AWS cuts in half the price of most of its Lightsail virtual private servers

https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/23/aws-cuts-the-price-of-most-of-its-lightsail-virtual-private-servers-in-half/

by Elect2 • 8 years ago

84 73 8 years ago

grezql2• 8 years ago

great news, I love spinning up Lightsail instances for new projects!! my current running instances are not updated, I suppose I have to recreate them then..

Edit: It seems they have added new instance types. My current instances are now 3.50$

https://snag.gy/3Q1fL0.jpg

omgtehlion• 8 years ago

Wow, tree fiddy.

How is cpu usage on these nodes? Aren't they oversubscribed as hell?

grezql2• 8 years ago

I havent noticed it any. I deploy .net core application + loadbalancers and db.

andy_ppp• 8 years ago

Can I have everything be as simple as Digital Ocean but still use their Managed Services like RDS?

krn2• 8 years ago

OVH provides Cloud Database[1], but only up to 4 GB RAM / 64 GB storage.

[1] https://www.ovh.co.uk/cloud/cloud-databases/

blunte• 8 years ago

OVH is a horrible company if anything goes wrong or if you have a billing issue.

Their tech and pricing may be good, but if there's any problem you'll spend a lot of time trying to deal with them or you'll just give up a let your wasted payment fly away...

nicolaslem• 8 years ago

Disclaimer: former OVH employee

I set up a small personal service a few months ago. My requirements were being dirt cheap and not having to manage anything statefull myself.

After looking at all cheap providers, very few of them had managed databases. So I ended up using OVH VPS + Postgres cloud database. The combo costs me 10€/month and runs surprisingly smoothly.

BrandoElFollito2• 8 years ago

I hate OVH (despite my patriotic conscience which yells "achetez français" :)) for what they did with the bandwidth to hubic services. It was close to zero, completely unusable.

Their customer service completely sucks, to the point they told me that they do need me.

I kepy this in mind when signing up for a huge cloud contract where I told them straight that the way they treat their customers shows. They could have told me many things but not "fuck off, go somewhere else". This cost them a lot of money but they did not learn anything when I recontacted them again from my personal account and the customer service was still the same (of course I could have used the contacts I had there but I wanted to see if the situation impoved).

eicnix• 8 years ago

You can but you have to deal with the latency between your host and the RDS instance hosted by AWS.

patd• 8 years ago

Why is there only 3 providers there ? This should probably include others like OVH, Scaleway, Vultr,

zython• 8 years ago

Also hetzner cloud

I dont know about the cores that hetzner provides and how they compare to the competitors, but ~3$ for a somewhat usable VPS is damn competetive

(not affiliated with hetzner in any way, other than I have one of those 3$ instances)

subbz• 8 years ago

+1 for Hetzner! They're great!

afandian2• 8 years ago

I'm currently using Hetzner Cloud in production. Not for user-facing services, but background data churning. Very happy with the service so far, and it has a Terraform plugin, which makes it convenient to use.

I think the feature-set and cost are in proportion, if you see what I mean. Compared to AWS EC2 its a great value proposition.

Interestingly, they recently announced a 'dedicated vCPU' option for about 10x the price. Top option is €269 vs €29, 32 GB vs 128 GB RAM. But I'v found the performance of the default product to be perfectly good for my needs.

The major shortfall with Hetnzer I have found is that the storage isn't scalable. You get what you get. You can choose SSD RAID or Ceph, but you still get the same allowance.

I'd love to hear from anyone else using it.

Edit: not Hetzner's traditional servers. I've used those too, and they're great value for money if you get them through their server bidding offering.

foepys• 8 years ago

I'm a Hetzner customer, too, but I'm quite sad that Hetzner doesn't really allow DNS configuration via a centralized REST(-like) API. You can configure DNS via an email interface but there are no officially supported libraries available and it's very clunky [1]. You effectively have to roll your own DNS servers or chose another DNS provider if you want to manage a lot of servers dynamically.

1: https://wiki.hetzner.de/index.php/E-Mail-Schnittstelle_Domai...

hs86• 8 years ago

Is use their CX21 (4GB RAM, 40GB NVMe/Ceph) offering for 4.90€ + VAT as a personal VPS and it makes running a little FreeBSD instance with ZFS and self-compiled ports affordable for a student.

Elect22• 8 years ago

The first section explained what kind of VPS were collected. Vultr sometimes charge estimated monthly costs (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13073048 ) , so it was not listed.

vader1• 8 years ago

I've been using Vultr for years and they've never charged me more than my monthly usage. A n=1 report from two years ago doesn't seem like a great reason to leave them out; I'm sure you can find complaints about every other provider's billing as well.

stef25• 8 years ago

OVH

Never again. Control panel is awful, closing your account requires jumping through all kinds of hoops (emailing a scan of your passport, really?). I still haven't succeeded.

pnutjam• 8 years ago

Nobody using time4vps? Their storage server pricing is amazing.

eahman093• 8 years ago

DO and Linode are very expensive compared to OVH, Scaleway or Hetzner. So this reads as "Lightsail announces 50% price drop, will still be very expensive"

(From another comment: https://snag.gy/3Q1fL0.jpg) -> $3.50 for 512 MB of RAM is a fucking rip-off compared to this: https://www.scaleway.com/

cbg02• 8 years ago

If all you're interested in comparing is price, then yes it is still expensive, but there are other considerations such as network quality, support responsiveness, the actual performance of the VPS.

eahman093• 8 years ago

Maybe OVH, Scaleway and Hetzner are better than DO and Linode in that regard.

adventured3• 8 years ago

Scaleaway is meaningless unless you're located in Europe.

If you're in the developed world, $2 vs $5 etc does not matter in most cases. The most important factor is that your host does what you need it to do, that the network is excellent and your servers are located where you need them to be.

If you're an American business you'd be foolish to host your servers in the EU. Locating your servers in the EU opens you up to their jurisdiction, which is a mistake, you'd be unnecessarily exposing yourself to multiple jurisdiction compliance. That problem is only going to get dramatically worse in the coming years. It's not worth worrying about saving a couple of dollars over.

eahman093• 8 years ago

I am European and it's 11 here; I'm talking to an European audience.

OVH has got a datacenter in Canada with good prices, compared to the rip-off Linode is.

candiodari• 8 years ago

Kimsufi has dedicated servers starting at 5$ per month. Yes, it's an atom, but it's yours alone, and is going to beat these on performance, memory and riskspace.

cbg02• 8 years ago

No ECC RAM, also their network isn't exactly top tier and many complain about support. You will get what you pay for.

minimaul• 8 years ago

Kimsufi gets de-prioritised compared to other services on OVH’s network and there are capacity issues.

This is probably due to the fact that a lot of people use them for cheap 24x7 torrent boxes rather than the cheap personal VPS alternative they were intended as.

dx034• 8 years ago

Why not use Hetzner cloud instead? It's shared but with ECC ram and faster CPU & storage

Outpox• 8 years ago

I would suggest adding Scaleway[0] to the list. I've used their server a bit and it worked well. I know them because of their parent company (Online) which I've been a custom for quite a few years now.

[0] https://www.scaleway.com/pricing/

jayonsoftware• 8 years ago

LightSail is the only vendor in this space to offer Windows hosting.

adventured3• 8 years ago

I know they're not listed in the comparison, however Vultr has superior Windows Server hosting as compared to LightSail. Their network is a lot faster and their servers are better. I aggressively recommend Vultr over LightSail if you're using Windows for something.

tnolet2• 8 years ago

I was pleasantly surprised by the quality and ease of use of Vultr. Really on par with DO.

amanzi• 8 years ago

I have nothing but good things to say about Vultr. Plus they're one of the few providers with a Sydney datacentre presence.

tnolet2• 8 years ago

So a regular EC2 T2.medium with 4GB RAM is $39 while a LightSail 4GB is $20. Damn. Need to switch some EC2 workload to LightSail.

romanovcode• 8 years ago

What does "Consistent 100% CPU usage" means? Does it mean that if I get the instance and use CPU on 100% it will shut it down?

ZiiS• 8 years ago

No, lightsail is less well documented; but are based on EC2 burstable instances. These have a baseline performance where you can use 5%-30% of the CPU, and accrue credits to burst up to using 100% for short periods.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/t2-credi...

If you are out of credits your CPU is just slower, you don't get turned off.

ernsheong• 8 years ago

Wish Google Cloud could have this kind of price point. 1vCPU + 1GB RAM on GCP is $19.22

majewsky• 8 years ago

wtf

2 vCPU + 2 GB RAM is about € 2,50 ($3.00) on https://hetzner.cloud. (Not affiliated, just a happy customer.)

jwilk• 8 years ago

AFAICS, it's 1 vCPU + 2 GB RAM for €2.50.

olavgg• 8 years ago

I have one of these too, run a PostgreSQL server. You get fantastic fsync performance for that price too. Not Optane level, but almost at the same performance as a dedicated Intel S3700.

aepiepaey• 8 years ago

On the far low end, BuyVM has a $15/year plan (1 core, 128M ram, 15G disk, 500G bandwidth).

Has been working well so far (a few years), though haven't really been close to any resource limits (yet).

LeonM• 8 years ago

That's really cheap, you couldn't even run a RPi at home for that.

jaxondu• 8 years ago

What do you use it for?

BrandoElFollito2• 8 years ago

I would use for anything I put on a RPi: a DNS server, a MQTT backend, some light backends for a web app (I need to connect to some light services and prices their output into a JSON), a monitoring service,...

hyperfekt• 8 years ago

Depending what core that is, you get more on the Google Cloud free tier (600MB RAM, 30GB disk). But: only 30GB outgoing bandwidth.

indigodaddy• 8 years ago

Thought it was 1G transfer max (not sure which direction or both)

sudhirj2• 8 years ago

This is probably based on the new T3 release. https://www.marketwatch.com/press-release/aws-announces-avai...

I'm guessing they're able to do burstable offerings with better baseline and burst at a lower cost than before.

ksec2• 8 years ago

That would make sense. But T3 are comparatively speaking, much slower than DO and Linode. When Lightsail were first released those benchmarks won't any good at all.

The only reason for using Lightsail is you want all those Amazon Services, which your LightSail can hook up free of transfer using Private Network.

sitkack• 8 years ago

Wait, so you can read from an S3 bucket for free using LightSail but egress at LightSail prices?

scarface74• 8 years ago

Hopefully this won't be taken as an anti-MS rant. I've been developing exclusively on Microsoft's platforms for over 20 years.

But, if developing and hosting in a cloud environment doesn't convince you to go Linux, nothing will.

While for the most part as far as feature parity and development tools, AWS treats Windows developers like first class citizens. The "Windows Tax" is clear in AWS when you can see the cost difference between running the same instance size with Linux as Windows.

Even worse, realistically, running any Windows instance with less than 8GB of RAM is painful. Your minimum cost is $70 a month.

Being in the Windows world so long, I was amazed when I started using AWS and found how much you could do with relatively few resources in the Linux world.

I never cared before, I was using other people's money.

But I'm not leaving .Net Core, its made transistioning to Linux hosted development less painful.

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-lightsail-update-mor...

askaboutit• 8 years ago

Meh. Look at the bandwidth pricing. If bandwidth is the Soda. DO is coke and lights sail is McDonald’s selling coke. You can get it direct at wholesale or buy it in a bottle for 5x more.

pritambarhate• 8 years ago

One quick question about LightSail Load Balancers: Is the outbound traffic from the Load Balancer to the Internet is charged separately or it is taken from the instances quota?

Scanned through the FAQ but couldn't find a clear answer.

dna_polymerase• 8 years ago

Wouldn't use Digital Ocean for shit, there are multiple stories of users were they cancelled accounts (actual production systems) because of sustained use or bogus DMCA claims.

zaarn2• 8 years ago

I wouldn't use a service for VPS either if they reacted to DMCA/Takedown Notice claims. As the operator of the server on that VPS the DMCA/Takedown Notice is my business not the providers.

Otherwise it's a way to convenient method to cripple the competition or shut someone's personal website down for shits and giggles.

chomp• 8 years ago

Yeah but that's not how the law works. A service provider risks losing its safe harbor status if it delegates a DMCA complaint to a party and then that DMCA complaint is ignored. Providers have an incentive to shut down services on the terms of the DMCA to protect their business. And even if you have a registered copyright agent for your business and a form on your site to report infringement, lawyers love to blast out DMCA claims to you, your agent, and your provider, as high in the chain as they can go. It's a huge headache.

Do you colo, or use non-US based providers?

jarland• 8 years ago

I'm sorry you feel that way. We always try to work with our customers to resolve disputes in the best way possible. There are two sides to every story and we do respect the privacy of our customers. If you would like to talk about anything specific that you are concerned about, I'd be happy to chat at jdonnell@digitalocean.com.

0x7f800000• 8 years ago

Still no IPv6.

AWS cuts in half the price of most of its Lightsail virtual private servers

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