[Guest98123]

Let me get this straight, right now AWS is billing me $270/mo for 3TB of bandwidth on my autoscaling web servers. With LightSail, I can get that same bandwidth, plus storage and instances for $15/mo?

In total, I'm spending about $15,000/yr on AWS, and someone spending $5/mo gets their bandwidth 18x cheaper than me? Shouldn't it be the other way around, and I should be the one with the discount?

I get enough headaches dealing with reserved instances, and trying to buy them at the correct time of the year to line up with price drops. Now, I need to consider dumping my autoscaling groups, EC2 web servers, and moving them to LightSail? Why not just give us a fair price on bandwidth, instead of more complications?

[nielsole]

From https://amazonlightsail.com/docs/

> Data transfer OUT from a Lightsail instance to another Lightsail instance or AWS resource is also free while the private IP address of the instance is used.

It could even be worth it to set Lightsail up as reverse proxy and profit off of very cheap(for AWS) traffic e.g. for S3. I can't really believe they would allow this. Am I missing something?

[eloff]

EC2 to S3 is already free. That's not true for all AWS services though. Also interzone bandwidth is charged at 0.01 leaving AND entering, making it the same as inter-region bandwidth costs. If lightsail is truly free for that it's a game changer.

[jdc0589]

my thought exactly.... set up a cluster of reverse proxies on lightsail in front of your web tier in the real aws account (making sure to reverse proxy over private IPs, assuming that's possible), build some automation to replace lightsail instances when they get to their bandwidth quota.... profit?

[rovr138]

> If you delete your instance early and create another one, the free data transfer allowance is shared between the two instances. Data transfer overages above the free allowance are charged at $0.09/GB.

I think you would still be charged. I think it would just be better to upgrade.

[nik736]

They want to destroy DigitalOcean, so they have to match their pricing. Additional traffic is also $0,09 / GB with Lightsail.

[Matheus28]

And that's incredibly expensive, considering many other cloud providers around the level of DigitalOcean (which I believe doesn't charge for using too much bandwidth atm) charge a lot less. For example, Linode charges $0.02/GB after the allocated bandwidth

And specifically for Linode, since all the servers draw from the same pool of resources, you can instead create a ton of $10 servers and grab bandwidth for $0.005/GB, which Linode is perfectly fine with (note that bandwidth is pro-rated, so you'd need to create those servers in the beginning of the month to take full advantage of it).

[swuecho]

I do not think they can. I am happy with Digital Ocean almost 3 years. Did not have any problem and pretty happy with it.

[diegorbaquero]

Exactly my thoughts. EC2 is stupid expensive in BW. If you are spending a lot just setup some reverse proxy :)

[neurostimulant]

Someone did a quick testing and apparently the bandwidth speed is capped at 100mbps, and even less for overseas traffic: https://ayesh.me/amazon-lightsail-review

[user5994461]

Do you use a CDN? If no. You should use a CDN.

[Guest98123]

I use a CDN for js/css/fonts/images, but the $270/mo is the bandwidth for the gzipped HTML going out from the web servers.

[bap]

This made me think of a thing I've done in the past so here's a brain vomit about 'base page caching' - most of which is probably irrelevant here but perhaps someone will find it useful:

I don't know how dynamic or unique your pages are to each user or if they're largely ubiquitous across all users.

Assuming the latter I know that you can cache a base page in some CDN's through a different header. Akamai's DSA product in particular allows you to cache HTML using the Edge-Control header that has matching syntax to Cache-Control. Edge-Control is stripped out in transit, the client never sees it. This allows you to control cache TTL in Akamai's edge servers independently of the client side cache.

A quick look through Amazon Cloudfront docs seems to indicate that Cloudfront cache's will respect the Cache-Control header but this can get complicated if you don't want the same TTL within client side browser cache. Perhaps I missed something, though?

Even if your page is dynamic but you're willing to go a route like Angular or ReactJS polymorphic client side apps you can still offload a bunch of those basepage requests assuming your app is suitable for this kind of design pattern. The assumption is that you will be relying on API's so additional complicated caching calculations may apply ;)

Depending on how you construct your cache key you can do a certain amount of multi-variate caching and still achieve pleasant cache hit rates. This applies to both base pages and fronting API's with a CDN.

Regardless it looks like for only U.S. traffic (as a yardstick) Cloudfront charges 0.085 per GB so futzing with the AWS calculator I split a page I'm very familiar with (49KB) across your 3TB for US only traffic and the price comes to $304.68. No savings.

Looking around I see that Fastly (a lower priced than Akamai - Varnish based CDN) charges a $0.12 rate, the price there in the same scenario would be something like $400 (the number of http requests made factor into some of these pricing models.) Akamai comes in at $500.

OTOH a CDN I've never used (Stackpath) might cost only $140 which would get you close to half your current spend. Remember that depending on your cache hit/miss ration and how many cache flushes (cache object invalidation) that price could be anywhere from slightly to extremely optimistic as you still have to pay for the requests between your CDN edge servers and your AWS origin.

To be fair, when considering pricing Akamai is the big fish here and has something on the order of 170,000 edge servers sprinkled all over the world whereas some of these smaller CDN's have far far fewer.

Once you're into some CDN's there's all sorts of wonky things you can do with parent-child tiering models that can be leveraged to further limit the number of times a call is made back to your origin (aws) server.

Here's a pretty good CDN pricing calculator: http://www.cdncalc.com/

[rovr138]

For $5, just try it..

At least a reverse proxy, maybe even some caching.