
Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS - polmolea
https://amazonlightsail.com/
======
Someone1234
Just to be clear: This service is offered by Amazon/AWS themselves, it isn't a
third party. That's a question I had when I first clicked, which is why I am
answering it here.

One big "gotcha" for AWS newbies which I cannot tell if this addresses: Does
this set or allow the user to set a cost ceiling?

AWS have offered billing alerts since forever. They'll also occasionally
refund unexpected expenses (one time thing). But they've never offered a hard
"suspend my account" ceiling that a lot of people with limited budgets have
asked for.

They claim this is a competitor for Digital Ocean, but with DO what they say
they charge is what they actually charge. I'm already seeing looking through
the FAQ various ways for this to exceed the supposed monthly charges listed on
the homepage (and no way to stop that).

Why even offer a service like this if you cannot GUARANTEE that the $5 they
say they charge is all you'll ever get charged? How is this different from AWS
if a $5 VPS can cost $50, or $500?

That's what Amazon is missing. People want ironclad guarantees about how much
this can cost under any and all circumstances. I'd welcome an account suspend
instead of bill shock.

~~~
blhack
This is exactly it. 5-6 years ago (I think), I signed up for an aws account
under the "free" or educational or something tier. AWS was newish at the time,
and I wanted to learn about it.

Via some accidental clicking in the control panel (trying to get an IP address
for the instance, I think?) I ended up getting a bill from them for over $100.
Which, to me at the time, was a huge amount of money.

It put me off of AWS forever. I don't ever want something that tells me how
much they're going to charge me _after_ I have already given them my credit
card information.

edit: they did credit me back when I complained, but that doesn't matter. The
risk to me wasn't/isn't worth it.

~~~
arcticfox
100%. I can't stand it. It's _unlimited_ liability for anyone that uses their
service with no way to limit it. If you were able to set hard caps, you could
have set yours at like $5 or even $0 (free tier) and never run into that.

One of my services had a Google BigQuery "budget" set at $100. One of our test
machines went haywire and continuously submitted a bunch of jobs. The "budget"
turned out only to be an alarm, and even that they sent us _8 hours_ late,
after $1600 of charges had been racked up. I responded in 20 minutes and shut
it down. Google insisted we pay the full bill. After I wrote up a blog post on
the situation and had the "publish" button warmed up, they finally relented
and refunded us for the amount of time their alarm was delayed. Absolutely
ridiculous that's not their policy to begin with...

~~~
zwischenzug
Me too. I want protection against my own stupidity, as well as sheer ignorance
of the charges. This put me off AWS for years, and I was deeply shocked there
was no one-click 'suspend at x$'.

For a company that supposedly puts the customer first, this is appalling.

~~~
Pyxl101
It's difficult to come up with a good model for how a billing ceiling would
work in software as a service. A good start would be to fully specify what
behavior you desire when an account hits its billing limit. Are you expecting
everything to keep working like normal while the cloud provider pays the bill
for those resources, or are you expecting the provider to fully shut
everything down in a way that prevents the accrual of further costs, or
something in between?

There are a number of resource types that, simply by existing, will accrue
costs. A lot of them, actually. On AWS that includes things like running EC2
instances, EBS volumes, RDS databases and backups, DynamoDB tables, data in S3
buckets, and more. The question is what should happen to these resources upon
hitting a billing ceiling?

Should EC2 instances be terminated (which deletes all data on them), DynamoDB
tables deleted, S3 data erased, RDS databases deleted? If that was the
behavior, it would be an _extremely_ dangerous feature to enable, and could
lead to catastrophically bad customer experiences. This is a nonstarter for
any serious user.

Conversely, if you expect those resources to continue to exist and continue
operating, then that's basically expecting the cloud provider to pay your
bill. The provider will then have to recoup those costs from other customers
somehow, and so this option sets poor incentives and isn't fair to others. If
you expect your account to remain open the following month, you'd have to
settle the bill, and we're back to square one.

AWS gives people tools to tackle this problem, such as billing alerts. These
can notify you over SMS, email, or programmatically when you hit an "$X this
month" billing threshold, and then you can decide what to do. Since these
events can be processed programmatically, it's possible to build a system that
will automatically take whatever action you'd like AWS to take, such as
shutting things down or deleting resources.

If you think all of this through, it's _really_ hard to come up with an
approach to billing limits that's fair and a good experience, so I think it's
reasonable for cloud providers to give billing threshold alerts while leaving
the choice of what to do in the hands of the customer.

~~~
bhntr3
It seems like a hard technical problem to shut down gracefully. But it's an
easy product problem. Just suspend the account. AWS must do this already for
some cases.

No one running a real business on AWS wants a hard ceiling instead of billing
alerts and service by service throttling. Which Amazon has.

So, this is just the nuclear option for people's pet projects. It's not a bad
thing to have but I wouldn't expect it to operate any differently than what
would happen if you broke the TOS and they suspended your account.

~~~
vidarh
> No one running a real business on AWS wants a hard ceiling instead of
> billing alerts and service by service throttling. Which Amazon has.

I know startups that I could bankrupt with a few lines of code and a ~$60
server somewhere long before they'd be able to react to a billing alert if it
wasn't for AWS being reasonably good about forgiving unexpected costs.

I'm not so sure no one running a "real business" would like a harder ceiling
to avoid being at the mercy of how charitable AWS feels in those kinds of
situations, or when a developer messes up a loop condition, or similar.

Perhaps not a 100% "stop everything costing money" option that'd involve
deleting everything, but yes, some risks are existential enough that you want
someone to figuratively pull the power plug out of your server on a seconds
notice if you have the option.

~~~
bhntr3
I meant a business that makes significant revenue and has enough users that
downtime or data loss would be unacceptable.

If you can't afford downtime you probably can afford to wait for the alert and
choose your own mitigation strategy. A system that can't tolerate downtime
probably has an on-call rotation and these triggers ought to be reasonably
fast.

If you can't react or can't afford to react, you probably can afford some
downtime / data loss.

So the system doesn't need to have granular user defined controls. Just two
modes. That was my point.

I think I triggered people with the phrase "real business" and I apologize for
that.

~~~
vidarh
> If you can't afford downtime

Only a tiny fraction of businesses can't afford downtime. A lot of businesses
_claim_ they can't afford downtime, yet don't insure against it, and don't
invest enough in high availability to be able to reasonably claim they've put
in a decent effort to avoid it.

In most cases I've seen of businesses that claim they "can't afford downtime",
they quickly balk if you present them with estimates of what it'd cost to even
bring them to four or five nines of availability.

> A system that can't tolerate downtime probably has an on-call rotation and
> these triggers ought to be reasonably fast.

A lot of such systems can still run up large enough costs quickly enough that
it's a major problem.

> If you can't react or can't afford to react, you probably can afford some
> downtime / data loss.

I'd say it is the opposite: Those who can afford to react are generally those
with deep enough pockets to be able to weather an unexpected large bill best.
Those who can't afford to react are often those in the worst position to
handle both the unexpected bill and the downtime / data loss. But of the two,
the potential magnitude of the loss caused by downtime is often far better
bounded than the potential loss from a crazily high bill.

------
2bluesc
Price breakdown vs DigitalOcean, VULTR and Linode.

Of course all things are not equal (i.e. CPUs, SSDs, bandwidth, etc).

    
    
      Provider: RAM, CPU Cores, Storage, Transfer
    
      ----------
    
      $5/mo
    
      LightSail: 512MB, 1, 20GB SSD, 1TB
      DO:        512MB, 1, 20GB SSD, 1TB
      VULTR:     768MB, 1, 15GB SSD, 1TB
    
      ----------
    
      $10/mo
    
      LightSail: 1GB, 1, 30GB SSD, 2TB
      DO:        1GB, 1, 30GB SSD, 2TB
      VULTR:     1GB, 1, 20GB SSD, 2TB
      Linode:    2GB, 1, 24GB SSD, 2TB
    
      ----------
    
      $20/mo
    
      LightSail: 2GB, 1,  40GB SSD, 3TB
      DO:        2GB, 2,  40GB SSD, 3TB
      VULTR:     2GB, 2,  45GB SSD, 3TB
      Linode:    4GB, 2,  48GB SSD, 3TB
    
      ----------
    
      $40/mo
    
      LightSail: 4GB, 2,  60GB SSD, 4TB
      DO:        4GB, 2,  60GB SSD, 4TB
      VULTR:     4GB, 4,  45GB SSD, 4TB
      Linode:    8GB, 4,  96GB SSD, 4TB
    
      ----------
    
      $80/mo
    
      LightSail: 8GB, 2,  80GB SSD, 5TB
      DO:        8GB, 4,  80GB SSD, 5TB
      VULTR:     8GB, 6, 150GB SSD, 5TB
      Linode:   12GB, 6, 192GB SSD, 8TB
    

In an easier to read gist:
[https://gist.github.com/637693650bc8bb9baadf6293a99e1813](https://gist.github.com/637693650bc8bb9baadf6293a99e1813)

~~~
zzzcpan
Curious, why don't you compare with known "non-cloud" hosting companies too,
that provide vps services, like ovh, hetzner, leaseweb, etc.?

EDIT: Anyone cares to explain his reasons behind a downvote?

~~~
kuschku
I expanded it with those companies:

 _Price breakdown vs DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode, OVH, and Online.net /
Scaleway: _

$5/mo

    
    
        | Provider               | RAM   | Cores | Storage    | Transfer |
        | ---------------------- | ----- | ----- | ---------- | -------- |
        | LightSail              | 512MB |     1 |   20GB SSD |      1TB |
        | DO                     | 512MB |     1 |   20GB SSD |      1TB |
        | VULTR                  | 768MB |     1 |   15GB SSD |      1TB |
        | Hetzner (virtual)      |   1GB |     1 |   25GB SSD |      2TB |
        | OVH                    |   2GB |     1 |   10GB SSD |      ∞TB |
        | Scaleway (virtual)     |   2GB |     2 |   50GB SSD |      ∞TB |
    

$10/mo

    
    
        | Provider               | RAM   | Cores | Storage    | Transfer |
        | ---------------------- | ----- | ----- | ---------- | -------- |
        | LightSail              |   1GB |     1 |   30GB SSD |      2TB |
        | DO                     |   1GB |     1 |   30GB SSD |      2TB |
        | VULTR                  |   1GB |     1 |   20GB SSD |      2TB |
        | Linode                 |   2GB |     1 |   24GB SSD |      2TB |
        | Hetzner (virtual)      |   2GB |     2 |   50GB SSD |      5TB |
        | OVH                    |   4GB |     1 |   20GB SSD |      ∞TB |
        | Scaleway (virtual)     |   8GB |     8 |  200GB SSD |      ∞TB |
        | Online.net (dedicated) |   4GB |     2 |  120GB SSD |      ∞TB |
    
    

$20/mo

    
    
        | Provider               | RAM   | Cores | Storage    | Transfer |
        | ---------------------- | ----- | ----- | ---------- | -------- |
        | LightSail              |   2GB |     1 |   40GB SSD |      3TB |
        | DO                     |   2GB |     2 |   40GB SSD |      3TB |
        | VULTR                  |   2GB |     2 |   45GB SSD |      3TB |
        | Linode                 |   4GB |     2 |   48GB SSD |      3TB |
        | Hetzner (virtual)      |   4GB |     2 |  100GB SSD |      8TB |
        | OVH                    |   8GB |     2 |   40GB SSD |      ∞TB |
        | Scaleway (dedicated)   |  16GB |     8 |   50GB SSD |      ∞TB |
        | Online.net (dedicated) |  16GB |     8 |  250GB SSD |      ∞TB |
    

$40/mo

    
    
        | Provider               | RAM   | Cores | Storage    | Transfer |
        | ---------------------- | ----- | ----- | ---------- | -------- |
        | LightSail              |   4GB |     2 |   60GB SSD |      4TB |
        | DO                     |   4GB |     2 |   60GB SSD |      4TB |
        | VULTR                  |   4GB |     4 |   45GB SSD |      4TB |
        | Linode                 |   8GB |     4 |   96GB SSD |      4TB |
        | Hetzner (virtual)      |  16GB |     4 |  400GB SSD |     20TB |
        | OVH                    |   8GB |     2 |   40GB SSD |      ∞TB |
        | Scaleway (dedicated)   |  32GB |     8 |   50GB SSD |      ∞TB |
        | Online.net (dedicated) |  32GB |     8 |  750GB SSD |      ∞TB |
    

$80/mo

    
    
        | Provider               | RAM   | Cores | Storage    | Transfer |
        | ---------------------- | ----- | ----- | ---------- | -------- |
        | LightSail              |   8GB |     2 |   80GB SSD |      5TB |
        | DO                     |   8GB |     4 |   80GB SSD |      5TB |
        | VULTR                  |   8GB |     6 |  150GB SSD |      5TB |
        | Linode                 |  12GB |     6 |  192GB SSD |      8TB |
        | Hetzner (virtual)      |  32GB |     8 |  600GB SSD |     30TB |
        | Hetzner (dedicated)    |  64GB |     8 | 1024GB SSD |     30TB |
        | OVH                    |   8GB |     2 |   40GB SSD |      ∞TB |
        | Scaleway (dedicated)   |  32GB |     8 |   50GB SSD |      ∞TB |
        | Online.net (dedicated) |  64GB |     8 | 1500GB SSD |      ∞TB |
    

Gist available here:
[https://gist.github.com/justjanne/205cc548148829078d4bf2fd39...](https://gist.github.com/justjanne/205cc548148829078d4bf2fd394f50ae)

~~~
SXX
It's must be said Hetzner have much cheaper offers on their auction:
[https://robot.your-server.de/order/market](https://robot.your-
server.de/order/market)

There also have no setup cost for these dedicated servers.

~~~
ris
They're also worryingly keen on non-ECC machines at the low end though

------
STRML
A compelling product. The dashboard looks great. They even replaced the
confusing term "user data" with "launch script", but they fall back into it
later. SSH in-browser is great too and can be bookmarked/opened in a
fullscreen tab. Uploading (instead of pasting) your SSH pubkey is a bit
annoying.

The docs appear to say you can add these to a VPC but I don't see how to do
it.

They don't say the SSD storage is local, so I'm sure it's not.

A few runs with `fio` confirms this is EBS GP2 or slower:

The bench: "fio --name=randrw --ioengine=libaio --direct=1 --bs=4k
--iodepth=64 --size=4G --rw=randrw --rwmixread=75 --gtod_reduce=1"

Lightsail $5:

    
    
      read : io=3071.7MB, bw=9199.7KB/s, iops=2299, runt=341902msec
      write: io=1024.4MB, bw=3067.1KB/s, iops=766, runt=341902msec
    

DigitalOcean $5:

    
    
      read : io=3071.7MB, bw=242700KB/s, iops=60674, runt= 12960msec
      write: io=1024.4MB, bw=80935KB/s, iops=20233, runt= 12960msec
    

More than an order of magnitude difference in the storage subsystems.

These appear to just be t2.nano instances (CPU perf is good, E5-2676 v3 @ 2.40
GHz,
[http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench3/8164581](http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench3/8164581)).

For advanced users, there isn't much compelling here to make up for the
administration overhead. It's a little cheaper than a similar-spec t2.nano
(roughly $4.75 on-demand + $3 for a 30GB SSD). The real win is egress cost;
you can transfer EC2->Lightsail for free. 1TB of egress would be nearly $90 on
EC2, but is only $5 on Lightsail.

In other news, EC2 egress pricing is obviously ridiculous.

~~~
JonoBB
The terrible IOPS performance on AWS is the biggest downside for me.

All competitors seem to outstrip AWS on this. Do they have some legacy
infrastructure that is just too big too upgrade to something more modern, or
is this "on purpose"?

~~~
manacit
As @STRML said, the difference is that Amazon is using network attached (EBS)
storage as the primary instance storage, instead of local SSD. This provides a
ton of benefit to Amazon, and some benefit for the user as well: CoW backend
allows for nearly instant snapshots and clones, multi server/rack redundancy
with EC, ability to scale up with provisioned IOPS easily, etc.

The downside is that the access methods for blocks mean some operations are
more computationally and bandwidth intensive, meaning you will get fewer IOPS
and less sustained throughput without paying more money. In addition, there is
always going to be a bit more latency when going over the network versus a SAS
RAID card.

As with all things in life, it's a tradeoff. If you look at other large
providers' (GCE, DO at least) network storage offering, you'll also see a
significant performance regression from local SSD.

~~~
user5994461
> CoW backend allows for nearly instant snapshots and clones

LOL => A 80GB EBS SSD snapshot takes more than 1 hour.

Subsequent snapshots are incremental and will be less slow.

> multi server/rack redundancy with EC

You can move drive manually after you stop an instance, if that's what you
call redundancy.

> ability to scale up with provisioned IOPS

Nope. You need to unmount, clone the existing EBS volume to a new EBS volume
with different specs, and mount the new volume. You can't change anything on
the fly.

The last time we had to change a 1TB drive from a database, we tried it on a
smaller volume... then we announced that it would be a 14-hours-of-downtime-
maintenance-operations (if we do it this way) :D

~~~
ris
> Subsequent snapshots are incremental and will be less slow.

Depends how much they've been written to since last snapshot. Heavy writes and
it can be just as slow again.

~~~
user5994461
Hence why I say "less slow" and not faster. There is nothing fast when it
comes to EBS volumes :D

------
Guest98123
Let me get this straight, right now AWS is billing me $270/mo for 3TB of
bandwidth on my autoscaling web servers. With LightSail, I can get that same
bandwidth, plus storage and instances for $15/mo?

In total, I'm spending about $15,000/yr on AWS, and someone spending $5/mo
gets their bandwidth 18x cheaper than me? Shouldn't it be the other way
around, and I should be the one with the discount?

I get enough headaches dealing with reserved instances, and trying to buy them
at the correct time of the year to line up with price drops. Now, I need to
consider dumping my autoscaling groups, EC2 web servers, and moving them to
LightSail? Why not just give us a fair price on bandwidth, instead of more
complications?

~~~
nielsole
From [https://amazonlightsail.com/docs/](https://amazonlightsail.com/docs/)

> Data transfer OUT from a Lightsail instance to another Lightsail instance or
> AWS resource is also free while the private IP address of the instance is
> used.

It could even be worth it to set Lightsail up as reverse proxy and profit off
of very cheap(for AWS) traffic e.g. for S3. I can't really believe they would
allow this. Am I missing something?

~~~
jdc0589
my thought exactly.... set up a cluster of reverse proxies on lightsail in
front of your web tier in the real aws account (making sure to reverse proxy
over private IPs, assuming that's possible), build some automation to replace
lightsail instances when they get to their bandwidth quota.... profit?

~~~
rovr138
> If you delete your instance early and create another one, the free data
> transfer allowance is shared between the two instances. Data transfer
> overages above the free allowance are charged at $0.09/GB.

I think you would still be charged. I think it would just be better to
upgrade.

------
ajkjk
I'm amused by the model they have in their banner: a bearded, tattooed man
wearing what appears to be a .. cape? We've come a long way since the stock
photos of 'smiling super-normal people wearing ties, huddled around a
computer'.

~~~
reid
Programming while sitting on a motorcycle?

[https://amazonlightsail.com/features/](https://amazonlightsail.com/features/)

~~~
pavel_lishin
Reminds me of Snow Crash.

> _Because shortly after he gets into Port Sherman, the wheels on his
> motorcycle lock up - the spokes become rigid - and the ride gets very bumpy.
> A couple of seconds after that, the entire bike goes dead, becomes an inert
> chunk of metal. Not even the engine works. He looks down into the flat
> screen on top of the fuel tank, wanting to get a status report, but it 's
> just showing snow. The bios has crashed. Asherah's possessed his bike._

------
IgorPartola
This is a non-starter without IPv6. I know some of you will be tempted to jump
ship from DO and Vultr, but please remember that by doing so you will continue
enabling Amazon to hold back progress. While ignoring AWS is not really an
option, as it offers some very unique features that are quite useful, this
thing does not.

DO is not great in this regard as their butcher their allocations, but Vultr
gives each VPS a proper /64\. Scaleway has partial IPv6 support (not for their
bare metal could, but their VPS's do support it).

I urge you to vote with your wallets, unless you really like paying $1/month
or more per IP for the foreseeable future.

~~~
abiox
> enabling Amazon to hold back progress

what do you mean?

~~~
TheSmiddy
We're running out of IPv4 addresses and need to move to 100% IPv6 ASAP or else
we're going to end up with a system where it's NAT all the way down.

------
anilshanbhag
Here is a comparison of $20 instances across DO, Linode and LightSail

All have 3TB transfer

Linode(Best): 4GB RAM, 2 Core, 48 GB SSD

DO: 2GB RAM, 2 Core, 40 GB SSD

LightSail(Worst): 2GB RAM, 1 Core, 40 GB SSD

I use this exact instance on Linode for my site
[https://dictanote.co;](https://dictanote.co;) that one extra core makes a lot
of difference when you want to take a backup of db or something intensive like
that.

~~~
old-gregg
Such comparisons are nearly meaningless.

    
    
      - What kind of SSD?
      - What kind of "core"?
      - How much are you over-provisioned on the physical hardware?
    

People are treating cloud resources like they're commodity, but they are not
(cloud service providers make it very hard to compare apples to apples). You
can have first-class PCIe SSDs on RAID 10 underneath that virtualized storage,
or you can have consumer-grade non-RAIDed SATA, but it's all "40GB SSD" to
you, the customer.

vCPUs are even worse. Buy a 20-core Xeon box, split it across 60 tenants, each
with 2 vCPUs each, or via 40 tenants with 1 vCPU?

~~~
jl6
Luckily, the prices are low enough that you can just test your workload on
each.

------
meritt
Is there anything preventing me from using these servers as proxies with
incredibly cheap bandwidth? I assume it stacks? When we reach transfer limits
I can just spin up an additional $5 instance to add another 1TB?

$5/mo per 1TB of bandwidth = $5.00 / 1024 = $0.0049/GB compared to EC2's
normal $0.09/GB -- That's a 91-95% discount on egress data!

~~~
adventured
Sort of. Lightsail service limits:

"You can currently create up to 20 Lightsail instances, 5 static IPs, and 3
DNS domain zones in a Lightsail account."

So obviously there's a hard cap within one account. The $80 account comes with
5tb, so one would have to be burning a bit of bandwidth - 100tb - to cap it
out. Frankly though, at $1600, Amazon is still printing a massive profit
margin on that 100tb of transfer.

These seem like they'd be good front-end servers hooked up to RDS etc.

~~~
dx034
Transfer is how they really make money. If you use a lot of services
(especially spot pricing) and only pay 10% of bandwidth charges it will likely
hurt them, so not sure if they'll allow it if many people start doing that.

------
raitom
Meanwhile, in France: [https://www.scaleway.com/](https://www.scaleway.com/)

Same thing with OVH, you can get a powerful dedicated server with unlimited
bandwidth for the price of a medium EC2 instance. I hope they will open their
datacenter in California soon.

~~~
msh
I don't understand how they can live on those prices.

I have their 3 euro arm server and have no problem pushing more than a 100
megabit a second from it.

~~~
loader
It's two fold. Amazon bandwidth is, I assume, premium tier 1. Where as ovh and
scaleway are probably lower tier. Lower tier bandwidth is dirt cheap, like
below $0.25 per mbps.

Edit: 3 things, it's also shared among a lot of users that don't use what they
can. For everyone using 100mbps there's probably 20 who use less then 1mbps.

~~~
dx034
OVH has a pretty solid network and are very transparent about peering and
utilization.[1] The network is definitely much smaller than Amazon, but never
had any problems with their peering, the network seems to have ample capacity
(whereas Hetzner had less reliable peering). I have several servers in the OVH
network in Europe and I get consistently high speeds for Europe&US,
independent of the time I test (don't have much traffic from Asia so can't
really test that).

They will offer you better peering if you pay extra, but even then you're
paying much less than at AWS for high traffic.

I suspect that AWS makes most profit with bandwidth while other services run
with a very low margin.

[1] [http://weathermap.ovh.net/](http://weathermap.ovh.net/)

------
Veen
I think a million VPS hosting companies just cried out in terror.

The major reason to use a VPS host instead of AWS is that AWS is complicated.
This seems to be just as simple as DO or a million other VPS hosts, with the
added benefit that it's easy to hook up to Amazon's other services if you need
to.

~~~
regularfry
Smaller hosts will make a decent margin on managed services. That's just not a
game Amazon want to get into.

~~~
ghaff
There's a lot of managed services on AWS and it's growing rapidly. But they're
delivered through partners, not AWS directly. I didn't write down the numbers
from this segment of the Re:Invent Global Partner keynote yesterday but, as I
recall, "next generation managed service providers" was highlighted as a big
growth opportunity.

~~~
antisthenes
I think the point was that Amazon's customer service is awful, compared to
smaller, much more nimble companies where you can get a technical person on
the line and get much more personalized service from someone in the US.

------
scosman
This is the first cheap bandwidth option I've seen on AWS. Transferring 1TB
out of S3 or EC2 is costs about $90, but is included in a $5 server with
Lightsail.

~~~
reacharavindh
Looks like you can spin up three of these instances as a proxy and pay $15 for
3 TB of bandwidth from AWS.

~~~
mark-wagner
Where do you see that? To me it looks like bandwidth is plan-wide. For
example, from the FAQ: "If you delete your instance early and create another
one, the free data transfer allowance is shared between the two instances."

~~~
reacharavindh
Full quote from FAQ : "How does my data transfer allowance work?

Beyond the free data transfer IN and between instances, every single Lightsail
plan also includes a healthy amount of free data transfer OUT. For example,
using the cheapest Lightsail bundle you can send up to 1 TB of data to the
Internet within the month, at no extra charge. Your data transfer allowance
resets every month, and you can consume it whenever you need within the month.

If you delete your instance early and create another one, the free data
transfer allowance is shared between the two instances. Data transfer overages
above the free allowance are charged at $0.09/GB. "

I assumed that each light sail instance would get the 1 TB bandwidth. But, the
FAQ seem to suggest that each plan gets 1 TB. I can't tell if I can provision
one VM of each plan and proxy bandwidth through. Say for $5 + $10 VM costs, I
get 1 TB + 2 TB bandwidths..

------
falcolas
Worth noting: $0.09 per GB for bandwidth overages. So, your $5 server with 1TB
out becomes a $95 if you have 2TB out.

~~~
STRML
Yet, this is the same cost on EC2 for the first 10TB, except you don't get 1TB
for free with EC2.

So essentially you're getting $90 worth of egress traffic for $5. It's even
more obvious now that EC2 egress pricing is ridiculous.

------
api
Not terribly impressed. It's like Digital Ocean and Vultr but with no IPv6 and
no direct network interface.

What I love about VPSes as opposed to AWS, Azure, or Google is that you get a
completely a la carte box with a direct interface right to the Internet and
both IPv4 and an IPv6 /64\. You can instantly provision "servers" that you can
do anything you want with -- you can treat them like "pets" to run a personal
blog or a legacy app, or you can herd them like "cattle" with your favorite
management and provisioning tools. The pricing is great and the infrastructure
is mix and match.

Many VPS providers (Vultr and I think DO as well) will even let you upload and
install an ISO directly onto the KVM instance over the web. That means you can
install OpenBSD or even weird OSes. I've heard of people putting wacky stuff
like OS/2 in the cloud this way. Some even allow nested virtualization.

A VPS is ideal for a large number of common work loads, but not all. For
things where I want to make extensive use of AWS's managed services or where I
want to have something more akin to a private data center, EC2 and similar
offerings from Microsoft and Google are great. But for those I want the whole
enchilada. If I'm going _there_ I want everything the EC2 management console
and API gives me including full-blown VPC, etc.

This seems to occupy an uncanny valley. Without IPv6, direct networking, etc.
it's a crummy VPS, but it's not as rich as EC2. The only pluses I see are
direct access to AWS services (but if I want that I probably want EC2) and
AWS's security and uptime "guarantees."

Problem with the latter is that it's largely marketing. I've routinely clocked
300-day-plus uptimes on Digital Ocean and I've also had EC2 instances
mysterious die or go into a coma. They might have something to say on
security, but I've never seen any real _proof_ that AWS security is
intrinsically superior to their competition. Neither DO nor Vultr has had a
recent major breach AFIAK and they all seem to use the same virtualization
tech.

------
sidcool
Noob question. How's this different from an EC2 instance in a VPC?

~~~
Someone1234
It isn't meant to be different, it is just "packaged" to make setting up a
working AWS instance cheap and easy.

If you're familiar with AWS then you can get a similar offering directly,
particularly using reserved instance pricing.

------
jakozaur
Just announced on AWS Reinvent Keynote.

It's nicely packaged their existing products (EC2, VPC, ...). So you can get
Digital Ocean like experience on AWS. You can still tune the underlying
services.

~~~
acejam
It's already too expensive compared to DigitalOcean and Linode. An $80/month
instance only gives you 2 CPU cores. For the same money you can get 4 @
DigitalOcean and 6 @ Linode.

~~~
dx034
Still don't understand why people use $80 vps. You can get at least 2
dedicated servers with each way more performance for that. Vps make sense if
you need low performance or quick resizing, but I doubt that's what most $80
instances are used for. Don't see how they make sense financially..

------
phillmv
It just dumps you into a revamped, less intimidating AWS console so I wouldn't
be too concerned about this for now.

The thing that keeps me away from AWS services is the depth of the service - I
need to be an expert in AWS on top of knowing how to configure my servers,
which for now is maybe a non starter.

It does show you the power of packaging: with a simple domain and thrown
together marketing page, you too can target another market segment.

------
jqueryin
My guess is Amazon wants to rope people into their ecosystem, and they've
recognized that many startups have opted for the cheaper VPS providers in
their bootstrap days.

This is an intriguing move and one that I'm sure DigitalOcean, Linode, and
Vultr have been fearing may happen.

The pricing is on par with these alternatives in the VPS space.

~~~
slig
> The pricing is on par with these alternatives in the VPS space.

Linode offers the double of the RAM for the same price for $10, $20 and $40
VPSs.

~~~
Someone1234
A lot of people, myself included, don't seriously consider Linode anymore
given their security problems (March 2012, 2013) and infrastructure problems
(Dec-Jan 2015-16).

~~~
amq
The biggest show stopper for me is the lack of block storage, while both DO
and Vultr have it.

~~~
juliand
They do, however, offer over 2x disk space in some of their plans. 80GB in
LightSale and DO vs 192GB in Linode

------
hbosch
I hate to deviate from the topic, but... is the guy on the front page wearing
a red cape?

~~~
heywire
Are you saying you _don 't_ wear a superhero outfit when you're coding??

~~~
beat
I wear a supervillain outfit. Goatee, white lab coat, menacing laugh.

------
ralmidani
A quick look at the pricing shows these are plagued by the same problems as
DO's offerings: only RAM scales linearly with price, while CPU, storage, and
data transfer do not.

Linode and OVH, while not as prestigious as AWS and DO, offer much more fair
pricing when you need more resources.

------
jjcm
Keep in mind if you are a current EC2 customer and are excited about a cheaper
VPS in your region, the VPSs are only available in Virginia. I was pretty
excited about a cheaper VPS I could provision in the Sydney area, but these
are restricted to a single datacenter.

~~~
hrrsn
Damn! I got excited at the prospects of cheap VPSes in Sydney :(

~~~
mosen
What about Vultr?

~~~
jjcm
How is Vultr compared to EC2? Latency is my biggest concern since I do all of
my dev work over ssh typically.

------
SwellJoe
It's funny to me that Amazon has looped all the way back around to this, while
a bunch of smaller providers who've been doing this for over a decade have
been trying to catch up with AWS on all the other fronts. But, realistically,
for a _lot_ of users, AWS is a stupidly complex beast just to get a website up
and running. I've written a bunch of code that interacts with AWS APIs in two
languages, and I still require a couple of hours to spin up anything new
there.

But, as others note, the variable cost factor seems to still be a sticking
point. I can setup a Digital Ocean droplet, or Linode, or one of a dozen other
low-cost VPS providers, for $5 or $10 a month, and I know it will never cost
more than that. Maybe I'll bump into memory, disk, or bandwidth limits...but,
AWS is a _killer_ if you aren't careful. I used to maintain (and pay for, out
of pocket) a non-profit's website on AWS, and the price ballooned while I
wasn't paying attention, due to automated backups to S3 and some other stuff,
and by the time I noticed was costing me $183/month, for a website that could
_easily_ run on a cheap VPS. My fault for not paying closer attention, not
setting up cost alerts, etc., but I moved the site off of AWS and onto one of
my own web servers, where it literally costs me single digit dollars to run
(it has many GBs of email but otherwise is a small site with very low
traffic).

So...unless they're giving me some reason to think I won't end up with a
massive bill one month because of a popular post, or something, I probably
still won't think "I know, I'll use AWS!", unless it's a situation where I
need the scaling capabilities of AWS.

------
terda12
When I started out webdev, I was told that I should use AWS. But not having
known how private/pubkeys work, or how ssh workds, how servers worked, it felt
a lot like being thrown in the deep end of the pool.

Then I used digitalocean because of the free 1 year server time github gave me
and everything was a breeze. They had tutorials for a lot of stuff, like how
pubkeys and privatekeys worked, how to use ssh, how a server works, how to use
nginx/apache, and even node.js stuff. I got up and running quickly even though
it was my first time using a VPS. It was super easy, and the best part was
with my knowledge gained from DigitalOcean, I was able to start using AWS with
relative ease.

I think Lightsail is a good competitor to DigitalOcean, good for newbies who
can't exactly figure out how much their server will use and charge them. But
imo, with the same stats and stuff as DigitalOcean as a newbie I'd stick with
DigitalOcean just because of how helpful their tutorials are in general and
how helpful their interface is.

------
tyingq
I can almost feel the pucker over at DigitalOcean, Linode, etc. It may not be
a better product, but that doesn't necessarily matter, given the brand power.

~~~
pesfandiar
Agreed. Everything else equal, I'd personally go with the more stable IaaS
provider as opposed to fringe ones that can go out of business or be acquired
out of existence.

------
nodesocket
I just ran speedtest.net on a $5/mo 512MB DigitalOcean droplet in the San
Francisco (SFO1) datacenter.

    
    
        ~ speedtest-cli
        Retrieving speedtest.net configuration...
        Testing from DigitalOcean (192.241.229.48)...
        Retrieving speedtest.net server list...
        Selecting best server based on ping...
        Hosted by Monkey Brains (San Francisco, CA) [5.93 km]: 2.132 ms
        Testing download
        Download: 921.09 Mbit/s
        Testing upload
        Upload: 705.31 Mbit/s
    

Can anybody run speedtest-cli[1] on a 512MB LightSail instance to compare
network throughput?

[1] [https://github.com/sivel/speedtest-
cli](https://github.com/sivel/speedtest-cli)

~~~
dx034
The problem with speedtest-cli is that the servers are set up to test domestic
accounts, not other servers. You can be lucky and get ~1GBs bandwidth, but
just because you don't doesn't mean that it's the fault of the provider. The
server specs and speedtest only require a 1Gbit/s port, so you will probably
not get higher results than yours anyway.

Network speed should generally not be the issue with AWS, it's disk iops where
the non-local SSDs will make a major impact.

~~~
nodesocket
Agree speedtest-cli is not perfect, but you can see from my test I got near
the 1Gbps that DigitalOcean advertises. I am curious if AWS LightSail even
breaks 100Mbps.

In terms of network speed not being important, that's not true. Lots of
workloads are network bound not i/o bound (load balancers, web servers, etc).

~~~
dx034
That's what I meant. The results show that the DO box is fast enough, but a
slow result doesn't indicate that you can't saturate traffic. It's really hard
to test without real-world traffic, haven't found a reliable way to do so yet.

------
ilaksh
[https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/does-
digita...](https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/does-digital-
ocean-come-with-a-cape-and-a-motorcycle-like-amazon-lightsail)

------
hackcrafter
What I was hoping for was a bare-metal (not-run through VMs) container runtime
like Joyent Triton[0] but with more pay-for-what-you-use pricing.

Unlike VMs, which statically allocate mem whether you use it or not,
containers have the chance to grow and reduce mem as workfloads go up and
down, which means you could pay for GB/h of mem usage on the right-sized # of
vCPU base.

Not sure if any IaaS/PaaS is doing this.

Joyent pricing[1] is still for static resource allocation and not cheap
compared to these larger players.

[0] [https://www.joyent.com/triton](https://www.joyent.com/triton) [1]
[https://www.joyent.com/pricing](https://www.joyent.com/pricing)

------
polack
The more you pay the worse performance (per $) you get. Pretty much a "take 2
pay for 3" kind of deal. No matter if it's a good price or not I would feel
like a schmuck if I went for any other option than the 5$ one.

------
xfalcox
Just ran a bench on then, and the Disk per is bad.

[https://gist.github.com/xfalcox/3b99beac4935fd154a4cbeb540dc...](https://gist.github.com/xfalcox/3b99beac4935fd154a4cbeb540dc45f3)

~~~
mbrookes
What Amazon doesn't advertise is that their "block" volumes are files on NFS
NAS storage.

~~~
juliand
Just for the record, I did the same on one of my small azure machines:

    
    
      CPU model:  Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2673 v3 @ 2.40GHz
      Number of cores: 1
      CPU frequency:  2394.441 MHz
      Total amount of RAM: 3439 MB
      Total amount of swap:  MB
      System uptime:   6 days, 15:49,       
      I/O speed:  20.1 MB/s
      Bzip 25MB: 4.27s
      Download 100MB file: 6.15MB/s

------
scotchio
Interesting. Pricing is worse than Digital Ocean here. Looks like Linode is
still best bang for buck strictly for price to power.

Random thoughts from shameless noob:

\- I like Digital Ocean's OS/app images for speed / smaller projects. Looks
like Lightsail offers this with Bitnami. Not sure how complicated that is in
their console.

\- Amazon IAM comes with a bit too much overhead for noobies like myself. Glad
this doesn't require you to set that up when you just want a quick and dirty
VPS.

\- Bah. Resizing/upgrading requires you to do it through API currently. That
kind of sucks.

\- Nice! 30 day free trial.

------
jedisct1
Lightsail: $5/mo 512 MB, 1 core, 20 GB SSD, bandwidth cap -- Scaleway: $3.2/mo
2 GB memory, 2 cores, 50 GB SSD, unmetered bandwidth.

Lightsail 2: $10/mo 1 GB memory, 1 core, 30 GB SSD, bandwidth cap -- Scaleway:
$10/mo 8 GB memory, 6 cores, 200 GB SSD, unmetered bandwidth.

OVH virtual servers have also always been cheaper than Lightsail, and
bandwidth is of course unmetered: [https://www.ovh.com/us/vps/vps-
ssd.xml](https://www.ovh.com/us/vps/vps-ssd.xml)

~~~
misframer
It looks like OVH doesn't charge hourly for those.

~~~
nikon
The OVH public cloud offers hourly instances (50% discount if monthly).

[https://www.ovh.com/us/cloud/instances/prices.xml](https://www.ovh.com/us/cloud/instances/prices.xml)

------
Hello71
The FAQ is extremely unclear, but if I'm understanding it right, doesn't this
make transfer out to Internet significantly cheaper if you insist on using
AWS? Instead of paying $0.09/GB, transfer to Lightsail for $0.02/GB then
transfer out for $5/1000 GB=$0.005/GB. You do have to deal with changing IP,
but you get a 1.26 order of magnitude decrease in price, and that's assuming
you don't bother actually using the extra compute.

~~~
finnh
The "transfer to Lightsail" step (from another AWS resource) is free, as long
as you use the private IP.

~~~
eloff
No, unless you setup VPC peering between the shadow lightsail VPC and your AWS
VPC, otherwise you'll be charged at least the $0.01/GB on egress, and maybe
the $0.01/GB on ingress into lightsail too (not sure, the wording makes it
ambiguous, one would have to try it.)

~~~
dx034
There are no ingress charges on lightsail, so the cost should max. be
$0.01/GB. Still cheaper than paying egress on AWS.

------
brandur
Nice: a much needed simplification of the AWS product surface area. While
their plethora of functions and features are tremendously useful for big
shops, but are a pretty high bar newer entrants.

Now if they could just get to the point where $5 gets you a running Docker
container running on the equivalent of the Lightsail VPS (without setting up
the backing EC2 infrastructure like ECS), I suspect that's closer to the
platform that many users really want to have ...

------
simonebrunozzi
This is going to be a hard blow for DigitalOcean.

I don't have huge hopes for their business going forward.

------
djrogers
This seems like a great option for a utility server for existing AWS
customers. With VPC peering you get free and fast transfer between one of
these and your existing AWS infrastructure, but in a nice one-price VPS.

I also wouldn't be too surprised to see some people using these as middle-man
boxes to reduce transfer costs associated with EC2 - $5 for 1TB is darned
cheap for AWS. Using one of these to back up data from some EC2 hosts would be
a win.

------
tomschlick
Any word on if this includes IPv6 addresses?

~~~
xfalcox
No IPV6

------
esteer
I'm a little confused. How is this different from EC2?

~~~
jewbacca
As far as I can tell, it's "just" the relevant AWS services, repackaged in a
more non-expert-friendly frontend, simplified for a DigitalOcean-like usecase.

Doesn't expose the full, intimidating complexity of the AWS management console
and workflow.

------
soccerdave
This is very appealing to me just because of the amount of bandwidth that is
included. I currently serve 20TB/month of static assets for only $160 spread
among Softlayer, Digital Ocean and Linode VPSs. If I can host my static assets
on the same network as AWS for the same price then that is a huge win,
especially since all new Softlayer VPSs only come with a measly amount of
bandwidth.

------
EasyTiger_
Still isn't enough for me to pull my sites off DO. Plus, DO don't have a
reputation for treating staff like absolute dogshit.

~~~
terda12
And DO has a nice established UI too, plus the plethora of tutorials for
newbies on how to setup postgresql, nginx, node, etc.

~~~
sintaxi
Not to mention...

\- no regions outside U.S. \- no floating IPs \- no Debian images

DO appears to have a considerably better offering.

------
k2enemy
I'd love to give this a try for my mail server that is currently hosted on
Linode. Half the price would be great.

Does anyone have experience with how "clean" the AWS IP addresses are? I'd
hate to switch to Lightsail and have to deal with deliverability and spam
blacklist issues. I've been fortunate to have had zero issues on Linode.

~~~
rajeemcariazo
I think your IP address issue can be an issue to any hosting provider. I have
experienced that issue with a VPS from SiteGround. May I know what mail server
do you install on Linode server?

~~~
k2enemy
postfix with dovecot, dspam, and postgrey

------
sheraz
I have a growing list of cloud / vps providers I like to kick the tires on.
I'll be adding this to the list as well.

~~~
jjawssd
What are your thoughts on Vultr?

~~~
boyter
Support isn't the best. I was attempting to restore a very large database and
they shut down my instance for using excessive disk and CPU. I didn't get any
response of what sort of limits to stick under.

Otherwise they are very similar to DO but with more data centres. The only
complaint otherwise is their instances start a little slower. The API is very
easy to use though.

------
ksec
Why are people comparing CPU Core and Transfers? Come on, this is HN. What
CPU, What Speed? KVM / Xen? What SSD? IOPS? etc.

It used to be Linode had the better of everything comparing to DO. Faster CPU
even if they are same core count. SSD had much faster IOPS. Less oversold
therefore bandwidth were good. And there is no point giving you 100TB transfer
per month if you are limited to 10Mbps port speed. Linode ran on _shared_
40Gbps Port and peak bandwidth were great ( for its price ). Then there is the
quality of the Network, ping time between different ISP and Exchanges. Linode
has consistently been better then DO. And not it offer double the memory.

But many are worried about Linode's security issues and therefore would not
even touch them with a ten foot pole.

I have yet to see quality VPS that offer a whole package better then Linode.
Vultr, OVH, Online.net and Scaleway included.

I am hoping Lightsail bring some competition here.

------
sathishvj
Hopefully Google Computer Engine will also compete at this price now. Even
though it seems to be cheaper than AWS in addition to having a good interface,
it'd be good to get a bunch of cheaper servers to do the small projects and
also give it out to developers in situations where static ips are a
requirement.

------
drej
I use AWS for a bunch of things, but the console has always been immensely
painful to use, especially to create a no frills simple VPS for a fiver. For
that reason alone, I use DigitalOcean and fiddle with AWS authentication if I
need to use some of its services there.

Lightsail looks excellent since the setup is just a gazillion times more user
friendly than the standard EC2. A single page affair, a launch script,
authentication, it's all there. Once launched, I get all the info and metrics
I need.

I kinda wish they streamlined their usual console to this level, but this way
it's fine as well. I don't tend to use S3 and EC2 as much as I'd like given
its non-existent UX, but this gives me hope that Amazon is taking user
experience seriously.

Sure, it may be underpowered compared to DO or Linode, but having all services
under one roof is worth it to me. I'm happy.

------
jedisct1
Price breakdown LightSail vs DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode, OVH, and Online.net
/ Scaleway:
[https://gist.github.com/justjanne/205cc548148829078d4bf2fd39...](https://gist.github.com/justjanne/205cc548148829078d4bf2fd394f50ae)

------
brianbreslin
This puts DigitalOcean in a tough spot. They aren't going after the top-tier
get your hands dirty customers AWS usually caters to, and they aren't going
after the no-tech skills audience of godaddy/bluehost/dreamhost etc. So now it
becomes a marketing battle for the middle.

------
mark242
Quick feedback for the AWS team:

* First, this is great. The simplified interface vs EC2 is terrific. This is the direction EC2 (and RDS and S3 and basically everything) needs to be going.

* Instances you start in LightSail don't show up in your EC2 console. I would expect there to be some kind of data sharing there.

* Similarly, creating a "static IP address" doesn't show up in your elastic IP list. I'm not sure if this is intentional, but to manage two different views of products that you're billing me for is... troublesome.

* Last, if I could migrate elastic IPs from EC2 to LightSail I'd be migrating all of my instances immediately. The bandwidth savings are _massive_. (Related: when is the 2TB limit for a t2.small going to be migrated over to EC2?)

------
nodesocket
I am the only one interested in performance? Do these perform like t2
instances
([http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/t2-instan...](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/t2-instances.html))
which are burstable and capped? What's are the network limits? Are the disks
physical or using EBS?

I don't understand why everybody on this thread is complaining about overages?
If you use more than the allocated amount you pay overages, simple idea. Why
in the world, would you want your server to just shut down when you reach a
limit?

------
sgloutnikov
While on this topic, does anyone have any experience with DreamCompute
([https://www.dreamhost.com/cloud/computing](https://www.dreamhost.com/cloud/computing))?
I was thinking about trying them out, but could not find any reviews/thoughts
about them. They seem to offer a lot, for very low prices. Here's more --
[https://help.dreamhost.com/hc/en-
us/articles/217744568-What-...](https://help.dreamhost.com/hc/en-
us/articles/217744568-What-is-DreamCompute-Predictable-Bill)

------
danso
Wow, what perfect timing. I just got approved for AWS Educate and was prepared
to do the work to batch auto-provision EC2 instances for my students, but this
is much easier to deal with. And at $5 a month for the cheapest machine, it's
about what I would have paid to set up a t2-nano instance (~$4.70). I didn't
need anything fancy, just wanted students to have their own machine to deploy
public-facing code (e.g. APIs).

The in-browser SSH also deals with the problem of students who are on Windows
machine. You haven't hated PuTTY until you've tried walking a student through
it on their Surface Pro.

------
nodesocket
I just created two 512MB Ubuntu instances and here are my thoughts. (+
indicates positive, - indicates negative, ? question)

    
    
        + You can use private networking for cross-instance communication.
        + You can even communicate with other AWS services by using VPC peering.
        + Hourly billing.
        - The firewall rules are not shared. You can't create a single rule and attach to multiple instances.
        ? What are the network throughput caps? Can't find it anywhere?
        ? Are the disk physical or using EBS?
        ? Can you snapshot a running instance, or does it have to stopped?

~~~
pritambarhate
The FAQs mention that the disks are EBS.

------
zyngaro
Very expensive. The 40$/mo plan on Linode, gives and you 4 cores and 8GB ram.

~~~
chm
It depends on the processors the machines use and the actual sharing of these
processors. I agree it looks more expensive but it might not be upon further
analysis.

------
ridruejo
People focusing just on pricing miss the point. The key factor here is that it
is easy to get started but if you need to scale you have the full power of AWS
offering and ecosystem that cannot be matched by VPS providers

------
ngrilly
Very smart move from Amazon.

The main advantage of Amazon LightSail over DigitalOcean are: built-in
firewall (instead of messing with iptables), managed database with AWS RDS,
and using S3 with a low latency and no networking cost.

~~~
nodesocket
DigitalOcean must implement a centralized firewall. This is the missing piece
for them.

~~~
edgan
The best way to thing about security groups is that they are switch based
firewall rules.

------
wazoox
I still don't get the VPS craze. For similar prices from OVH, online.net,
Hetzner, etc. you've got vastly more powerful physical servers with vastly
larger storage... What's the point really?

~~~
boyter
Infrastructure as code. Use the API the build machines from scratch on demand.

It can be a very powerful model if done well, or done poorly cost a lot for
less performance.

I use Hetzner myself for my large projects but the machines were configured
using the same scripts I practiced over and over again on DO.

------
kohanz
How much of a threat is this to Digital Ocean, Linode, and others?

~~~
KayL
Customers (non-tech guys) trust Amazon more than others.

~~~
harryh
Tech guys too. Linode is a joke and Digital Ocean isn't a whole lot better. I
wouldn't trust either one to host a serious business.

------
corford
Hardly a Linode or DO killer yet but could become interesting if/when they:

1). support more linux distros (hint: Debian)

2). let you place instances in other AWS regions

3). let you pool bandwidth quotas across instances

4). improve the cpu/memory competitiveness of their $20+ plans

Also, don't like the firewall being configured via the dashboard (reminds me
of the same crappy approach used by scaleway). Alarming too that their SSH
console auto logs you in (even if you started an instance with your own public
key rather than Amazon's).

------
N0RMAN
tl;dr Only available in us-east-1 (N. Virginia)

~~~
r1ch
Wish this was more obvious. Signed up only to find out during creation that
this was the case. Was hoping to see how the Seoul location routing was as I'm
looking for a cheap VPS with low Asia-EU latency (ie not across the US).

~~~
dx034
OVH has good connections in that direction. Don't have a lot of data to back
this up (not much traffic from the region), but the tests I ran looked good.
And it's certainly cheaper than lightsail

------
stephanheijl
I could see the appeal of some of the lower range hardware plans, but
especially the higher tiers seem way off in terms of pricing. Can someone
clarify why a 2 core/8GB machine costs 80$, where other IaaS providers charge
far less for such rigs? (DigitalOcean gets you 4 cores for 80$/m, TransIP gets
you 4 cores, 8GB and 300GB SSD for <55$/m...)

~~~
Veen
Speculation, but DO may be overselling their servers at a higher rate than
AWS. I know for a fact that lots of other VPS providers do this.

------
adnanh
Small print: Some types of data transfer in excess of data transfer included
in your plan is subject to overage charges.

------
andromad
This is how aws trying to re:invent ...a lot of stuffs from them this year is
trying to crash those smaller saas provider and the open source world like
chalice... It seems like they are reinvent the wheel and try hard to grab
every single tiny piece of market. I am moving to gcp...at least they handle
oos better

------
neom
Given the long term strategy of DigitalOcean and how vastly different it is
from what AWS seems to be executing on, I don't think this announcement
actually changes things for DO that much. There is a mass consolidation about
to happen in the IaaS space and it's smart for AWS to capture some amount of
that.

------
chrisper
It seems that you can only create instances in Virginia and you can only
choose between Ubuntu 16.04 and Amazon Linux.

------
Kephael
With how versatile the AWS ecosystem is and the quality of the Amazon brand
this has the potential to absolutely demolish most of the small time VPS
providers. Unless you provide a niche such as DDoS protection or PCI/HIPAA
compliant hosting I do not see how you can compete for legitimate customers.

------
desireco42
I meant to say that it was about time someone comes up with something like
this, but seems that in the details AWS complexity can still bite you.

Is there a service, that you know of, that would simplify AWS so that we can
just use it with predictable expenses and ability to grow? Maybe I am asking
for too much.

~~~
fooey
Heroku? They've basically just a usability shell on top of AWS.

------
tamalsaha001
This is exciting. In case any AWS folks are reading this, are there any plans
to support Debian 8 as Bare OS?

------
dschulz
I don't see anything disruptive here. I already have roughly the same
cost/benefit with Linode.

~~~
bfrog
Correction, you see a piss poor attempt at competing with Linode/DO/Vultr with
no guarantees you won't piss away thousands by mistake or suffer magical and
impossible to understand performance issues.

------
ilaksh
If you read the fine print, the price and performance isn't actually as good
as Digital Ocean and a few other similar services, so unless you actually are
using AWS services AND need your VM to be in the same VPC or data center as
the services, then it doesn't make sense.

------
secabeen
This is pretty good. I'm currently paying about $3.50/mo for my existing
t2.nano-based reserved VPS, and this provides a lot more space and bandwidth
for not much more money. If they offered it with a reserved-instance discount,
it would be even more compelling.

------
debt
i'm still using linode. been using it for 10 years.

------
msh
Strange, I can't seem to find the price of bandwidth when you exceed the
included 1 TB.

~~~
mbrookes
$0.09/ GB ($90/TB). Good luck if you host a service which then gets HN or
Reddit hugged!

~~~
nodesocket
I've been on the front page of HN multiple times, you won't even come close to
the $5 limit of 1 TB. This is ridiculous.

~~~
dx034
Different if you're on the front page of reddit, or on some popular subreddit.
If you don't have all static files on a CDN you can easily exceed 1TB within a
few days. Assuming it's a side project that you're not constantly monitoring
and you're away for a few days, you could find a hefty bill when you come
back.

------
bfrog
One day their pricing and performance might actually be competitive. Today is
not that day.

------
staked
This is certainly more in my price range for personal stuff (family sites,
etc). Definitely going to take advantage of the free 30 days to kick the
tires. Curious to see what sort of server monitoring is included.

------
dfrey
I guess this service might prevent people from migrating off Amazon services
to DigitalOcean (or other VPS providers), but I don't really see a compelling
reason to use this service instead of DigitalOcean.

~~~
manacit
I think this could quickly change in the 6 month to 1 year horizon as Amazon
(potentially) adds onto this product with other AWS services built into this
product.

Imagine if you could easily spin up DB instances and create LBs within
LightSail - they would offer more features than DigitalOcean (or any other
"VPS Provider"), while being price and usability competitive.

I would definitely be nervous if I was DigitalOcean - there are still
advantages (support, tutorials, etc), but this closed the gap significantly.

------
amq
So, it is basically the EC2 "t" family with a simpler (but almost equal)
pricing and simpler administration.

    
    
      t2.nano = $5
      t2.micro = $10
      t2.small = $20
      t2.medium = $40
      t2.large = $80

------
usaphp
Digital Ocean still has a better pricing, for example for $20 on Digital Ocean
you are getting 2 CPU server vs 1 cpu on amazon. Also $80 Digital Ocean offers
4CPU server while Amazon gives you only 2CPU.

------
jsamuel
Confirmed that LightSail works with ServerPilot
([https://serverpilot.io/](https://serverpilot.io/)).

LightSail's default firewall opens ports 22 (SSH) and 80 (HTTP) but has 443
(HTTPS) closed. That seems like a terrible default for making a developer-
friendly service. Hopefully they fix that and open 443 by default. Otherwise,
a lot of wasted time is going to be spent by developers who have configured
SSL on their sites and don't know why it isn't working.

LightSail feels very similar to DreamCompute that DreamHost launched,
including the approach of only allowing SSH public key auth without any option
of using password auth. So, they're intentionally leaving out some users with
that approach.

------
nsebban
It seems to me the exact same service existed already, by picking a stack on
Bitnami's website, and single-click-launching it on AWS. The price structure
is clearer on Lightsail though.

~~~
ridruejo
Lightsail also uses Bitnami stacks underneath, so it is very similar indeed.
It is an easier way to get started with AWS but with the potential to graduate
to the full offering

------
BlackMonday
Why would I use that? With Hosteurope I get 4 vCores, 6 GByte guranteed memory
(burst to 12), 200 GByte SSD, traffic flat (but only 100 MBity/sec), monthly
cacelable for 20 euros.

------
utopcell
Having upper ceilings in charging is a big deal for me.

For this I prefer
[https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/](https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/)

------
popol12
OVH is still cheaper, with half the disk space but 4 time the RAM.

------
mfisher87
Why are a full half of the front-page stories about Amazon?

~~~
manacit
AWS re:Invent is currently happening, they're announcing all of these products
right now (and they are summarily posted to HN)

~~~
mfisher87
Thanks! It wouldn't be so bad if there weren't so many duplicates :)

------
clooless
Just created a "Magento" instance and attached a static IP. It still
unreachable with a browser after a few hours. What did I do wrong?

------
kzisme
Am I understanding this correctly?

DO and LightSail are close (if not) exactly the same spec wise?

All that's I've read so far essentially states that.

------
St-Clock
They advertise a 99.95% EC2 SLA. Does that mean that an instance in a single
AZ can go down anytime for any length of time?

~~~
laxk
Anytime but not any length of time.

99.95% SLA means the following amount of downtime: Daily: 43.2s Weekly: 5m
2.4s Monthly: 21m 54.9s Yearly: 4h 22m 58.5s

~~~
St-Clock
But in the context of ec2, downtime must occur in two AZ at the same time to
count IIRC. There is no single AZ SLA.

------
alexjv89
This is super awesome... Lesser devops requirement particularly in early
stages trying to validate an idea.

------
unoti
No nonsense predictable pricing is what drove me to Rackspace years ago. Good
for Amazon figuring this out.

------
gigatexal
meh the pricing fails in comparison to say linode.com's offerings.
[https://www.linode.com/pricing](https://www.linode.com/pricing)

granted with AWS you probably get access to other AWS products so there's
that...

------
magicbuzz
Sigh. US-only. That kills it for me.

------
stevesun21
I really like the web based firewall configuration feature. Hope Linode and DO
adopte it.

------
blairbeckwith
Really wanted to get more information on this, but all of their Docs links
currently 404.

------
rjurney
What is this service? I can't figure out how different it is from Linux on
EC2.

------
ne0free
I pay ~25$ for 8 gb - 1tb - unlimited bw From online.net.. 80$ is ridiculous

~~~
mthoms
European data centers only though, correct?

~~~
dx034
OVH has similar prices with a dc in Canada. Worth looking at. Latency will
still be high to the west coast, but lightsail is also us-east only, so no
real difference there.

------
riledhel
Is there a way to quickly/easily migrate EC2 instances to LightSail??

------
awssailin
This is extremely, really, amazingly, exciting news! Except for the potential
charge gotchas in the FAQ which seems to fly in the face of the banner text on
the main page but still...very exciting!

------
tomphoolery
Wow I didn't know Amazon bought DigitalOcean ;-)

------
nik736
The performance of DO is far superior compared to Lightsail. Disk speed is a
joke, network seems to be limited to 50MB/s (which is not that bad) and who
knows how much they throttle the CPU.

------
nepotism2016
This site can’t be reached

I guess I google virtual private servers

------
josh_carterPDX
Seems like a play to compete with Digital Ocean.

------
imdsm
PSA: The chap in the photo is wearing a cape.

------
homero
Wow they're going after digital ocean

------
kkotak
No Windows Server? Surprising.

------
nikolay
Digital Ocean is in trouble!

~~~
dx034
Don't think so. Not for any disk-heavy or bandwidth-heavy users.

------
dorfsmay
The pricing/specs are suspiciously very similar to one of the largest VPS
provider.

------
chintan16
Time to move from DigitalOcean finally

------
dbdhbdvdv
Fbdnnd

------
brilliantcode
What a day for AWS on HN. 8 AWS products made it to front page. I've learned
new AWS product like Cognito today just from the comments (ironically in the
"Google is Challenging AWS" thread).

I feel as excited as I was for Azure's Build 2016. Now I'm feeling pulled to
AWS. This is great for AWS, not so much for Google Cloud which further fades
into obscurity in my mind. I'd love to see that change, more competition in
the cloud space = more options for us developers = more conditions in our
favour.

Amazon LightSail just killed digitalocean for me which has been steadily
getting more expensive (for instance I can't downsize to a less expensive plan
once I resize my image, meaning I forked out $100/month for something that
would work for $5/month + multiple DO images now cost monthly fee.

$5/month + tight integration with AWS products is enough for me to move
completely off DO. If only AWS had DO's community style documentation, I'd
definitely question DO's future viability.

Now a killer IDE from AWS that lets me deploy and configure AWS without
leaving the IDE, that's a checkmate move, which I think will be very difficult
for me to switch to another cloud provider. Right now things are in flux but I
think an in-browser/desktop IDE like Cloud 9 with one click deploy to AWS
would be the end game for other cloud providers.

~~~
mgberlin
Their yearly conference, Re:Invent, is going on this week, so there will
probably be more announcements to come.

~~~
neuronexmachina
Yep, there's two keynotes at AWS, one Wednesday by the AWS CEO, and one
tomorrow/Thursday by the AWS CTO Werner Vogels. I'm expecting quite a few more
announcements during the Vogels keynote.

------
wcummings
Can I migrate EC2 instances?

------
devhxinc
[http://imgur.com/4iGafDz](http://imgur.com/4iGafDz)

~~~
mayli
When I saw the $5/mo price, I know it's targeting lowendvps customers from
Digital Ocean. But if the management UI of LightSail is still the EC2 one, I
will give up. Their UI feels laggy and less intuitive.

