
Amazon flipped a default and made me thousands of dollars - jasonkester
http://www.expatsoftware.com/Articles/amazon-flipped-a-default-and-made-me-thousands-of-dollars.html
======
markwillis82
As a recently new customer to AWS. This service sounds really useful.

Quite possibly one of the best pricing pages[1] I've seen in a while too.

[1] [https://www.s3stat.com/Pricing.aspx](https://www.s3stat.com/Pricing.aspx)

~~~
jsingleton
AWS pricing is crazy complicated. I gave a presentation on this a few years
ago ([https://speakerdeck.com/jpsingleton/aws-
pricing](https://speakerdeck.com/jpsingleton/aws-pricing)). It may be a bit
out of date by now but I could update it and write it up as a blog post if
people are interested?

~~~
seanwilson
> AWS pricing is crazy complicated.

I agree strongly with this. I've had clients before who would refuse to make
the move up from VPSs despite numerous advantages because the AWS product
descriptions and prices were incomprehensible to them.

~~~
eip
It's not hard. Just figure out what your costs would be on dedicated or
colocated hardware. Then multiply by 10.

~~~
jsemrau
Everything is hard if you try it for the first time.

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whizzkid
Here are my 2 cents about the pricing page you have @jasonkester

"Cheap Bastard Plan" is both little too much slang, and unpleasant to look at
if you are in a demo to show this service to upper management.

I am not saying that you should have a boring, enterprisey pricing page with
formal words, in fact I really like what you did there with free plan. Just
saying that you can rephrase it with little more easy-going words. :)

Great product, congrats!

~~~
jasonkester
You'll want Upper Management to be looking at the Features Page[1] instead.
Though I should probably add some more check marks to it just to be on the
safe side.

[1]
[https://www.s3stat.com/Features.aspx](https://www.s3stat.com/Features.aspx)

~~~
Sebguer
The fact that some of the 'features' are two lines, but there's no way to
differentiate rows makes that page kind of hard to read, fwiw. Not that it
really matters, because who actually gives a shit about those aside from the #
of check marks!

~~~
milankragujevic
Just wanted to +1 this issue, OP can fix this if they increase the width of
the container of the page.

------
leoalves
Hey Jason congrats on your product. Really liked your writing style. Very
funny and informative. Nice job.

Do you worry about amazon releasing something to analyse the logs and killing
your business? They just released Amazon QuickSight in beta and I think you
will probably be able to import logs from their services. Of course the user
will have to create the reports themselves but I guess your audience is tech
savvy.

~~~
jasonkester
Absolutely. But it's been 10 years now, and the best they've come up with is a
sort of stripped down Cloudwatch-style request count graph for Cloudfront
usage. That did actually cause a bit of a dip in signups when it came out, but
I think there's still a need for more detailed reports.

But yeah, the expectation is that they'll squash it dead any minute now. I'm
hoping that the next thing I'm building will have replaced S3stat as an income
stream by the time that happens.

~~~
rocky1138
Care to enlighten us on just what that is?

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NeutronBoy
EDIT: Well that will teach me to read more closely! Continue below if you want
to see me make an idiot of myself. Turns out I missed the point

So as I type this the votes are charging up the ranks (about 10 votes since I
started typing this comment), so let me start off:

I can't possibly see how this is Amazon's fault. You're arguing that you offer
a service for free (for a little while anyway), and that more people are
taking you up on that because they have logs lying around, because Amazon has
prompted them in the past to save these logs?

I mean, shouldn't this help your service?

a) now people can try it out because they already have logs and don't have to
wait (which you've already identified was an issue), and

b) now people will end up with a bucket full of logs, think 'how can I analyse
and use these logs', and go looking for a product like yours!

~~~
m-app
Although I mostly skimmed the article, I have to say that the feeling I got
from the article changed a couple of times between positive v. negative. This
left me confused and because of that I guess I missed the point as well.

~~~
nicky0
For me, the words "amazon made me thousands of dollars" in the title rather
set the tone.

------
nbevans
Such a shame that Azure Blob Storage doesn't support "default pages" i.e.
index.html

Then it could be used for static web site hosting just like S3 :(

See also:
[https://feedback.azure.com/forums/217298-storage/suggestions...](https://feedback.azure.com/forums/217298-storage/suggestions/1180039-support-
a-default-blob-for-blob-storage-containers)

~~~
jsingleton
Wouldn't it be easier to use GitHub or GitLab pages for a static site?

~~~
nbevans
Depends on the scenario really. If you want it version controlled, yeah sure.
But there are other use cases that don't need that. You just want a
"publishing target" that is low cost and minimal complexity. Plus
GitHub/GitLab don't have the same number of availability-9's that Azure Blob
Storage or AWS S3 can have.

~~~
jsingleton
True but if you don't have a billing account set up then SCM can be easier. I
usually stick CloudFlare in front of it for availability (with multiple
entries for the origin in the DNS). You can even add a page rule to cache the
HTML in case the server does go down.

~~~
nbevans
Yeah I've done the Cloudflare + GitHub pattern as well for a couple things.
But not everything is suited to that, nor needs that. Cloudflare also isn't
going to cache large static content for very long or at all. Or just having
any cache in between at all might be the wrong solution entirely. Anyway... :)
S3 supports this and AzStorage doesn't - this needs fixing!

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andrewvijay
Felt good after reading the story. That's a proper happy ending!

~~~
daddykotex
I really enjoyed the writing style :)

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erikb
The way everything is formulated it sounds like successfully exploiting
people, but actually it's the good side of capitalism: Someone providing a
valuabe service and getting paid well for it.

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NietTim
Well, turns out your tool is exactly what we were looking for a few days ago.

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hbhakhra
The cheap bastard plan seems like it would be great for SEO, any stats you can
share with us jasonkester on how well it worked out?

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NikolaeVarius
I'm actually quite amazed that a more fleshed out solution to AWS logging
doesn't exist. I've worked on a small side project to pipe AWS logs to
arbitrary locations for work purposes so that they could be visualized in
whatever tool of your choosing

Mind if you could cover some broad details about how things are handled in the
back end?

~~~
jasonkester
I've been meaning to write that blog post for a long time.

In broad terms, EC2 is the perfect fit for a service like this, that needs to
run something like 100 hours of computing each day, but needs that all to
happen during a 3 hour window before Europe wakes up in the morning. It's even
more fun when something breaks and I get to spin up 200 machines in one go.
For like ten dollars.

I use something like 8 different AWS services for various bits of the thing.
Everything from computing to storage to queueing & mail. I even used them for
payment at one point.

I'll try to get that writeup out the door.

------
tantalor
@jasonkester Aren't you worried about attracting unwanted attention from
Amazon's lawyers for using their trademark in the name of your business?

[https://aws.amazon.com/trademark-
guidelines/](https://aws.amazon.com/trademark-guidelines/)

~~~
flipp3r
Why should he be? Where in the document does it say Amazon has "S3" as a
trademark? His service isn't called "Amazon S3stat"

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wkoszek
Just came back here from this other HN thread (How many lines is Candy Japan
code base) and your S3 stats seems like it'd be cool to learn about too. Have
you ever published anything like this with some $$$ numbers?

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anshargal
I really hope that Amazon will provide at least basic per-bucket monthly
statistics for free or a small price.

It is unintuitive that you need to parse logs or pay $10 month to find out how
much you are paying for each bucket.

------
eastbayjake
Jason's other blog posts are really great -- reminds me of patio11's writing
style. It's a shame he's only blogging "semi-annually"!

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strictfp
Funny to see the americans in here torn between loving or hating the blatantly
capitalistic OP ;)

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sairamkunala
Isn't a similar thing possible through ELK stack for those who are already
maintaining one, the logs should be sent to Elastic Search for indexing. It
might not be as customisable as this product.

~~~
mindingdata
Definitely possible but as is the case with most Saas products, It's much
easier and convenient to just pay someone $10 a month to do it for you rather
than hosting an entire ELK stack somewhere (And having to upskill to get it
all working efficiently).

~~~
sairamkunala
I agree. it works if companies are not already using an ELK stack. Looks like
a great product!

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theantonym
Sounds a lot like [https://qloudstat.com/](https://qloudstat.com/) which I've
been using for a while.

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ge96
What a guy. Way to be an entrepreneur or businessman.

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HiroshiSan
Very antifragile of you

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mhawkins
The cheap bastard plan is excellent!

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pmontra
Off topic but about that blog: please make the text darker. I had to zoom it
at 1 cm per line before being able to read it comfortably (some 400 dpi
screen). My tablet is laying over a magazine and I can read its darker text at
less than half the size.

~~~
jasonkester
Excellent timing. I was getting a bit grey-texted out while proofreading it
this morning, and actually made the code change on the dev side.

But the blog started seeing a dozen requests per second before I could push
the change live, and I've been in "nobody touch nothin'!" mode ever since.

But I snuck that CSS change in just now.

~~~
kristianp
I think the problem is the font-weight. I wasn't really able to read the page
until I changed it from 300 to 400. I don't think anyone should reduce the
font-weight of their body text, it just looks too greyed-out.

~~~
pmontra
Some fonts work well only with some specific values of font-weight. Maybe this
is the case.

------
epse
Please please make that site responsive. I do a lot of checking and things on
my phone and if I can't read your site I will assume I can't use your project
on my phone and go on with my life.

------
eganist
Tangent:

> I’d much prefer to keep those minutes for things like blowing off work for
> the day to go rock climbing because it’s sunny and I can do that because I
> run my own company. The less time I have to spend dealing with these
> customers, the better.

This doesn't really instill confidence in the level of post-purchase support
I'd get if I were to buy in. I can easily empathize with the mentality and can
even appreciate it if it's intended as humor, but all I see here is "I just
want you to pay me."

~~~
jasonkester
Ah, but consider the support lag you get for most products, and the person
from whom you receive a reply to your email (and their ability to actually do
anything about your issue).

So yeah, you might have to wait until the next day for a reply. But that reply
will be to say that your issue has been fixed (by the guy who built the
product) and that no further action is required on your part.

People seem to like that. (And a guy can only really climb hard a couple days
a week without injury, so it's entirely possible you'll find me in front of
the keyboard.)

~~~
eganist
I appreciate this reply a bit more, though it's worth noting that this
approach doesn't really scale all that well.

As you add customers, you'll eventually be stretched thin as you try to cater
to different needs (assuming that's your goal—it might not be!). Assuming you
eventually bring on other technical folks, I'd argue that you'd want to
prevent this same language and mentality from persisting as a part of company
culture.

But again, your goal might only be to reach a certain size and live
comfortably. If so, then you're probably fine. I suppose my qualm was more
with the image conveyed by your language more than anything else.

~~~
hueving
>I appreciate this reply a bit more, though it's worth noting that this
approach doesn't really scale all that well.

That's OK for personal businesses. Not everything needs to be a billion dollar
company.

~~~
eganist
Right, hence my third paragraph:

> But again, your goal might only be to reach a certain size and live
> comfortably. If so, then you're probably fine. I suppose my qualm was more
> with the image conveyed by your language more than anything else.

