AWS Hosting

AWS hosting experience

As some of you know I've struggled with tildes hosting my games, and finally gave up and signed up for AWS a week ago. Why AWS? I don't really know, but given their size and breadth (encompassing a good chunk of the Internet) I figured it is likely to at least be reliable.

My attempts to get a cheap host at some barely-known place or one of the German facilities failed miserably. Also, unsurprisingly, trying to sign up for Oracle was a disaster with four $1.00 holds on my credit card while telling me my credit card was no good and customer service never responding.

In the meantime, my t3.micro instance has been a blessing. I cannot think of a single complaint -- I spun it up knowing nothing about AWS to full steam in maybe 10 minutes. It is friggin fast (after dealing with tildes) and my utilization is almost always 0.0! Since I am not running all the crap you see when doing a ps on a tilde, this machine has infinite resources for me.

Having said that, what followed was interesting.

The AWS web interface is Lovecraftian. Every day my login screen seems entirely different and sometimes tries to log me into some other subsystem after a capcha and TOTP check... There are threats of new login subsystems coming.There is strange terminology indicating the need for one of the hundred or so products. There seem to be many, many different ways to see the same information and even more ways to get to the pages you may recognize. I don't think I've followed the same path twice yet.

And then, there is the billing.

There is a free tier and a 180-day free trial period. None of these mean what you would think. You get a $100 credit, and if you used products from the free tier during the free trial, the cost is billed against the credit.

I have a theoretically something like a $6.00 a month machine. The billing is hourly, so it shows up as $0.0081/hr., I think. But somehow my credit is down $3.00 or so after a week of use. It is also a little random. Today I have $96.24 left. Yesterday it was 97.44. Other days it says $100, but elsewhere something else. Sometimes I see a graph. The budget tools claim that all my costs are 0 (because of free trial? Because it's only been a week?).

My 8GB drive costs a couple of bucks a month, I think.

Looking deeper, I think the IPV4 public address is something like $0.004/hr, and there are traffic charges, which should be negligeable.

There is probably something else.

I could probably get away with an arm-based t4g.nano instance with 1/2GB RAM for $0.004, but the rest of the charges will still take me closer to $10.

The credit should last me through the 180-day trial period, at which point I will know what my monthly charges look like. I will report my findings.

In the meantime I got a DDNS address so should I move elsewhere, at least people's bookmarks should be stable.

Sep 07 · 3 months ago

10 Comments ↓

Yeah the AWS interface is ... uh.. baroque. In my Real Job I have to deal a lot with AWS and Azure. After your trial period, you might consider a VPS provider such as digitalocean, etc. I would have recommended Linode in the past but post acquisition I'm not as keen on them. Anyway, have fun and remember there are reputable VPS providers out there :)

Thank you, @remort.

Digitalocean was next on my list.

I started doing the free course on the essentials of AWS on their skill builder site to get more clarity on what all those services they offer are about. It is giving me a lot more clarity, but I am not even half-way through yet. We'll se how it goes by the end of it.

I have been using RamNode for many years and have been pretty impressed with their performance per price point, and their interface is very straightforward. Some of the folks over at hashnix.club have used Contabo. I hear a complaint or two from them every once in a while but it is largely positive.

If you want to explore other providers, lowendbox.com is a good one to check out. They aggregate low-priced VPS providers and do a mostly-good job. I have tried a few bad ones from there before, but it's also how I found RamNode.

Thank you.

I had tried a few links from lowendbox, but they were bullshit, $55 discount from $60/mo for first 3 months kind of scams. I will try your links

@ingrix: at RamNode, do you need to buy their 'ddos-filtered IP address' or is there an 'unfiltered' one for free? I could not figure it out frowm their website

edit: I think it is labeled optional in the billing page...

@stack I assume you don't have to buy it. unless it's included in what I use already (which is nothing fancy, normal cloud server stuff) I have never purchased that service and still have my sites online.

Odd things happening:

After userid/password/CAPCHA/TOTP, I get "invalid credentials. Try again later or <SIGN IN>", the latter being a button. It took me a while to realize that clicking the button actually just lets you in!

A few times I got a dialog box telling me I've been logged off. Dismissing it gets me right back in

Strange indeed...there's ghosts in these machines...

I did AWS and Google for a few years, especially if you can use the free-tier stuff, might as well take their money. Then I decided I wanted an ultra cheap VPS hosted in Canada with non-US ownership (for reasons) and actually good specs. I went with OVH and haven’t been happier. 2 vCpus, plenty of storage, ram, and “unlimited” bandwidth. The admin interface for all these options are terrible. Maybe digital ocean is okay, but you only suffer through it very occasionally.