[PedroBatista]

Since the very beginning AWS has been an adversary to their own customers.

Either you invested your time/money in deeply knowing their ins and outs ( And you're fine spending your life that way ) or you're just a cog inside someones else's big wallet and don't care.

If you're not a big corp or don't have VC money to burn, there are much better options than AWS. The feeling of not getting f"#$ed over every step of the way is priceless, Azure is barely any better.

[raxxorrax]

Heh, my company hosts a very small service with < 100 users a month for very specific b2b purposes. We pay around 20$ a month for complete hosting, although AWS is constantly reminding me that I could spend around 50% of that if I do X, whatever that may be.

We don't pay for support tiers and I was extremely surprised that we got a response within ~6-8 hours to unlock their mail-service (SES). You have to do your homework to convince the support employee that you are not building the next spam-network. So they actually have to read all your antics.

It can be a solution for small business with lower traffic applications and after being surprised that they didn't just ignore my request I cannot say their service is bad.

I have another AWS-account, but that is unrelated to the one I use for my current company. Billing of all cloud services is intransparent and I can only believe them if they say I used n hours of CPU time. Don't even know how I would begin in calculating that. Still, their billing console is very helpful. I just ask myself why they put links to your requests for payment everywhere, but not to the actual tax-invoice. That one is ridiculously hidden.

I never had any training for AWS and I tend to skip reading documentation if it gets too boring. They are certainly expensive buttons, so my advice would be to use the credit card of your employer to check it out.

[jon-wood]

Amazon have entire teams of people who's job is to optimise customer's bills so that you end up paying less, and they're incredibly good at it. You need to become a big enough customer that they assign an account manager to you for that to become apparent without doing some digging, but I'm pretty sure if you open a support ticket asking about this they'll help you out.

[PedroBatista]

Their job is to make you don't pay over the threshold where you would leave. They are obviously not on your side.

If Amazon wanted to solve these problems they would change the pricing structure, they are not stupid, they know exactly what they are doing since day one and it's working. The moment it stops working for them they will do something about it.