> people new to the platform would love a default e.g. $5K/month limit (or less).
I ran into that issue when I wanted to play with AWS EC2 (few years ago, maybe it has changed since then, or maybe I didn't look hard enough). The free VMs were too slow to be usable. Considering my usage, I was unlikely to run into un-expected spendings, but I didn't want to take any risk. Can anyone recommend a similar service with a simpler customer interface where you can set up a simple safety spending limit?
If you're just looking at VMs you'd probably be better off with something like linode or digital ocean, and get flat monthly fees.
Though amongst those service-types, I can't really recommend beyond the fact that linode & DO didn't give me any headaches for the one month I used them
> If you're just looking at VMs you'd probably be better off with something like linode or digital ocean, and get flat monthly fees.
Which means you won't learn AWS/Azure/etc instead, and they lose mind-share. This is actually an argument for why they SHOULD offer hard limits, not an argument against.
If their goal is to push startups/newbies/hobbyists to other platform, they're definitely on the right path. If the goal is to make their cloud services safe to learn/start using, then they could do much better.
Yeah, for my personal projects I always stick to flat fee hosts like Linode and only ever used AWS for some backup storage in S3, and GCP for a geographical region that Linode doesn’t serve well. And whenever I use the big clouds I get paranoid and have to check billing & usage very often since I’m always just one oops/DDoS away from incurring a large bill, as opposed to the flat fee hosts where I leave shit running for months or years at a time without worrying. (FWIW Amazon Lightsail might be a flat fee service, but I heard performance is pretty bad so never tried it.)
Yes, Lightsail’s egress overage fee is the same as EC2’s crazy egress pricing (at least $0.09/GB), whereas Linode charges me a much more reasonable $0.01/GB if I go over.
Newbies/hobbyists shouldn't be using aws/azure over digital ocen/vultr/linode unless their hobby is learning aws/azure. Most startups shouldn't either.. if you can't afford to hire an aws/azure expert you shouldn't be using it. You are probably doing it in a way that will cost you in the future.
> if you can't afford to hire an aws/azure expert you shouldn't be using it.
Your logic is a self-contradiction:
- You need an expert to use AWS/Azure
- It is unsafe to even learn AWS/Azure without already being an expert.
Where do these experts come from? Osmosis? If there's no safe way to learn them, and being an expert is a prerequisite to using them, then you've created an artificial self-limiting supply shortage.
This is another argument that defeats itself and shows that these limits are absolutely needed to stop a mindshare loss/lack of expertise.
I still worry about someone getting into my account. The largest insurance would run $2,240/month, and you can spin up 25 of them no questions asked. Plus there's Spaces, backups, snapshots.
My own mistakes are probably a greater risk, but still. Turn on that 2FA.
One of the original points (though they've expanded in capabilities since then) of cloud services is that they're pay-per-use and can scale up and down as needed. Of course, that cuts both ways. If you mostly just care about compute, you probably just want some traditional hosting service with bandwidth caps (rather than transfer overage charges).
I ran into that issue when I wanted to play with AWS EC2 (few years ago, maybe it has changed since then, or maybe I didn't look hard enough). The free VMs were too slow to be usable. Considering my usage, I was unlikely to run into un-expected spendings, but I didn't want to take any risk. Can anyone recommend a similar service with a simpler customer interface where you can set up a simple safety spending limit?