I knew I’d get the counter points here on HN, but I’d argue we’re probably the exception here. AWS can be really cheap, but it is easy for things to go wrong. Bandwidth, commonly unmetered at places like OVH or Hetzner, can cost a fortune at AWS if you get attacked. And while AWS will refund you once or twice, after that you’re either left scared or on the hook eventually.
Absolutely! It just happens to be a good fit for me :)
I use very little bandwidth and processing with the vast majority of my projects. In the even that I do need heavy lifting for a couple hours, it still tends to be a pretty minimal cost.
Now for sustained heavy loads/bandwidth… I definitely would look elsewhere for hobby projects.
Edit: and I agree with your point about attacks. I have pretty aggressive monitoring set up around billing.
AWS has the easy to use Lightsail[1] VPS offer with cheapest product at $3.5/mo but they'll likely increase these prices as well, since there's an IPv4 address included.
Counterpoint: My hobby projects all use AWS because that's what I am familiar with, and they have the cheapest prices. I also reuse a lot of resources like a database to further save costs.
Some companies have been allocating a bunch of pointless IPv4 addresses and I think that's why AWS is doing this. A friend of mine have reduced the number of IPv4 addresses his employer uses by 80% (100+ IPs) in less than a week. That's a huge saving, but those IPs should never have been allocated to begin with.
Depends how many IPs you're using. If you're using 10, who cares; if you're using 100, I dunno. If it's 1,000 or more, that's real money you probably shouldn't be pissing away. (OTOH, a lot of cloud spend is pissing away money, so what's another $45k/year)
But if you have 100 backend servers that mostly communicate on the internal network/VPC and need their IPv4 mostly for updates, it seems easy to justify standing up a proxy and reconfiguring your template. At least if your engineers aren't in Silicon Valley and thus don't cost you $400/h.
you don't have to break even on implementation. you will get billed every single year, so if you can have two dudes solve this in 3 months, you can break even in 3 years and every year after that you saved money
In most companies that would worry me. That there isn’t anything more impactful to work on than a project that breaks even in 3 years likely is over staffed and I’m likely on the chopping block when things turn south.
Why :-( ? There's no way MIT was using more than a tiny fraction of that /8; now it's actually being put to real use, and MIT probably got some money out of it. Everybody wins.
MIT was using it. Not efficiently, but MIT sold addresses that were in use at the time due to what appeared to be IT ineptitude.
It was also shortsighted. It was a massive resource, MIT presumably sold it for under $200M (I assume far under), and now AWS plans to rent the addresses at a rate that will be around $600M per year if they manage to rent them all.
