Cheap virtual box hosters – Amazon's Lightsail is out to destroy you (yes, you, Digital Ocean)

Re: Yawn

You got the Linode pricing wrong, it's $10/month for the 2GB plan, which is probably why Linode isn't worried. I'm certainly going to stick with them (once I'm ready to start a server up again).

Re: Yawn

You missed memset - 20$ per month and 40GB SSD for the 2G two core instance. The one core is 10$ - this is for the newer high IOPS SSD instances. With 12 month discount it goes down to ~ 15$ month or 7.50 per month respectively.

Amazon missed the point. Completely. The reason why people host with all of these providers is exactly that - flat pricing, no price shocks and permanently attached static IPs. So, no, no and no thanks. They take their overpriced (light)sail fold it and get themselves towed back to port.

I will stay with what I have at memset for yet another year (11th year and counting).

Re: What is the point ?

Duncan Mac makes a great point, and is exactly what I was wondering.

I could do better for less money from my home VDSL connection.

Re: What is the point ?

These providers are not cloud services - they are VPS. It is a different niche.

They have "sysadmin" uses - small web systems, mail hosting, mail relay, ticketing systems, vpn concentrator, etc - all the stuff you would run on an SMB server.

You can get every single one of the elements somewhere else, often for free, but you cannot get the integration. For example - I can find a few places which will host a ticketing system for me, but none of them will integrate it correctly with my mail flow and other stuff. Also, the baseline prices for an instance will be several times higher than the cost of a small VPS.

Running these applications on a VPS requires permanently attached static IP address. With their dynamic IP address attachment via API and pricing of IP per hour Amazon totally missed the what are these VMs used for.

Re: What is the point ?

"using an onsite server means that your data is not exposed to the NSA and whichever US companies they feel like selling it to"

That's understandable if you live in the US, but if you live in a country with more draconian legislation (eg the UK), you might want to keep a VPS running as a VPN endpoint etc.

Re: What is the point ?

I find it useful because it's got a static IP address, I can use it for VPN services and as an endpoint for my mail server (which redirects to my home system via other means where the ISP blocks port 25). It's a convenient remote web host, too, and a useful launch point for when I want to poke my own system from the outside. I used to host my websites with a provider who gave me an ssh shell as part of the package. With the VPS I get the whole machine to do what I want and host as many websites and back-end databases as I want.

However, it does mean you're responsible for your own security, so a bit of care in setting it up is required.

Re: What is the point ?

"Unless you have a very intermittent large demand - why use a cloud service?"

You are not comparing like-for-like pricing. To have a fair comparison, you need to take into account space, HVAC costs, server hardware costs and depreciation, capital costs, network & security management costs and doubtless quite a lot more that I've missed.

Certainly in the UK, I can get a VPS and perhaps even a public Cloud service running for far less even than the cost of electricity for an equivalent server - let alone the other overheads.

Re: Amazon isn't going to destrioy anybody

That is their whole modus operandii. They want to put all other retailers and service providers out of business.

Re: Virtual and real servers?

"Say you aren't into development but just want a web server, mail server and VPN end point?

I can see the flexibility in a virtual server environment, and the potential economies for the provider, but is this now the best route to an emtry level hobby server?"

Nope, the best entry point - in terms of cost - for a web service is still a shared server. Followed by a VPS from a low cost provider. Costs can be insanely low, especially if you can pick up a special offer.

For most individuals, public cloud for running web services is never going to make sense while costs are balanced as they are. Where they begin to make sense are when you need a highly variable workload - e.g. you need to scale up periodically. Or where you need a large "virtual datacentre" for specific workloads.