

Remind HN: AWS Free Usage Tier Begins Today. - OoTheNigerian

Will you be porting your apps? I am wondering how this will affect developer friendly hosts like Linode.
======
cperciva
Related reminder: AWS free Data Transfer In has ended effective today (unless
it gets extended again).

------
singer
More info: <http://aws.amazon.com/free>

------
lsc
>I am wondering how this will affect developer friendly hosts like Linode.

I don't know... but I got a whole lot of signups after posting on the other
thread about this, so I suspect it will have less of an impact than I
originally feared.

~~~
ido
I use prgmr & slicehost and just signed up for aws.

I intend to use s3 to lighten up to load on my bandwidth limits by hosting the
largest static files (media files in my case) there, but plan on remaining
with the VPSs for all the rest.

------
tibbon
Unfortunately, I wasn't able to get in on this. I signed up for an AWS account
right after micro instances launched. Yet, when I looked at them I realized
they weren't as cheap as I initially thought (I had assumed the reserved
instance fee covered you as your entire cost for the whole year). I didn't
ever use it, but doing so made me ineligible for this. Emailed amazon twice.
Very strict on brand new accounts only.

------
sagarun
I will test and try Fedora 14 <http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_14_on_EC2>
:D. My first _cloud_ experience. Thanks HN for the reminder.

------
krobertson
My fear is more how this will affect others already on AWS. More network
latency issues? More EBS latency?

Even though it is small, a large number of small users could only add to the
problems others are feeling.

~~~
cloudwalking
Are you unhappy with AWS? I was considering switching to them, should I
rethink that?

~~~
krobertson
AWS is great if you're small to medium sized. Once you reach a point though,
scaling in AWS is difficult.

Scaling a database in AWS is difficult, no matter if it is relational or
NoSQL. We see boxes with hardly any load get 50% IO wait time and stay there
for 20 mins. Try and scale anything when you get that.

------
cmelbye
I'm not porting existing apps, but I'm using this as an opportunity to start a
new one on a fresh system with a ton of tools available.

------
zmitri
Can someone suggest a good AMI to start off with?

~~~
paulofisch
Here's my take on an Ubuntu 10.4 AMI that fits in the free 10GB EBS allowance.

<http://guru.gg/aether/ubuntu-10-4-amazon-aws-free-tier/>

tl;dr The default AMI's for Ubuntu take 15GB which will cost you $0.50 a
month. This is a quick hack to get down to 10GB.

------
sliverstorm
It would be great to have my own Linux box always available from anywhere
without having to have an extra tower under my desk, but I can't let myself
get hooked on it. Even a micro instance, after the free year runs out, costs a
decent chunk of change. (Not expensive, just more than I'm willing to pay for
a box for flights of fancy)

~~~
cmelbye
You're not going to find much cheaper than $14.60 (the price of keeping a
micro instance running for a month.) Rackspace Cloud's 256MB RAM instance is
$10.95, and there are probably a few random VPS providers here and there with
cheaper servers.

~~~
moe
Oh, there is cheaper. E.g. thrustvps.com starts at $5.95 for 512MB. Naturally
the number of use-cases where it would make sense to give up the stability of
amazon/rackspace in exchange for a saved $5/mo is rather limited.

~~~
jackowayed
I've had really good luck with thrustvps so far. I found them from
lowendbox.com and got 15% off the already-absurd prices forever, so I'm paying
$5.06/month for a 512MB box.

It's OpenVZ instead of Xen, but I don't really care; I wouldn't really be
taking advantage of Xen anyway. (And they have Xen for a couple bucks a month
more.)

I have no idea how its performance compares to Linode, AWS, etc, but stability
has been fine so far, after 3 months. I kind of expected to have downtime by
now since it's so cheap, but pingdom tells me there's been none.

If you're looking for a cheap VPS so you can run relatively unimportant things
(ie. not your startup, unless it's just a side project that isn't bringing you
any money yet), it's a good choice.

~~~
sibsibsib
I had some pretty bad luck when I signed up a couple weeks ago. The node I was
on was very unstable. Fortunately they are pretty responsive and have moved me
to a stable node in a different DC. The new node is way more solid.

As for cost, it's pretty cheap - $7.95 for a 512MB Xen.

