I got an email saying there was an issue with my account, called them within 10 minutes of the email and was informed they had already deleted all my data.
They reinstated my account which was just a blank shell, nothing remained but my username and password.
You get what you pay for.
If you go with them make sure you back up your data to a separate provider.
I think both of the above cases were normal TOS violations like hosting porn. If more serious crime was involved the response might have been different.
I've had stuff at Hetzner for about 5 years and I'm very happy with them.
At the moment we're running a 3-node Galera-powered MySQL cluster on the EX52-NVME servers,[0] costing a _total_ of $2,800/year.
I'm a Co-Founder at https://vantage.sh/ - thanks for posting this, Jeff!
I think the biggest call out here is that Vantage Cost Saving Recommendations are profiling not only things like AWS Savings Plans and Reserved Instances but we are also directly integrated with AWS Service APIs that allow us to surface higher-fidelity cost-savings measures on a per AWS service or resource basis. Over time, we will be adding to the suite of checks and recommendations.
Also, it's worth calling out that these recommendations are available to all users -- including users in our free tier.
I'm happy to answer any questions if folks have them.
> I am a Vantage user but I don't see any Cost Recommendations. What is happening?
> There are two possible things causing this: (1) Vantage has not yet run the process for finding cost recommendations for your account yet and you can check back later (2) your account is well-optimized from an AWS cost perspective and there are no recommendations for you to review.
> In either case, Vantage will continue to monitor your AWS account for all changes and be sure to surface Cost Recommendations to you as it finds them.
"Maybe we'll provide useful guidance, maybe we won't, but we won't tell you which. Maybe you're perfect. Maybe we never ran an analysis. Maybe we'll run an analysis in the future, maybe not."
We mention elsewhere in the post that for service and resource level recommendations we do this as often as your Vantage account syncs - which you can initiate at any time from the top navigation bar.
For recommendations like Savings Plans and Reserved Instances we are running this process weekly for now but that may change so we will definitely add a timestamp as to when that occurs.
If it is just from normal API (probably list instance/lb), is it really enough in order to create proper recommendations?
do you have an estimate on the cost/usage you are adding for each scale of customer?
Is it possible to set up a billing email? I would rather not have to forward the invoices every month.
Prior to contacting support, please just invite your team-mate to your Vantage account from the account settings page.
1) Moving to spot instances where possible 2) Autoscaling rules 3) Reserved instances where possible 4) Moving everything to AWS Graviton based instances
I cut the bill by ~70%.
However, what gets us our greatest savings on AWS are two things.
First, we have the luxury of being able to take advantage of Reserved instances. We have decided how much we are wiling to commit on EC2's, RDS, etc. and it saves us 10-30% depending on what we do.
Second, and this is perhaps the more interesting one. We started working with an "AWS Advanced Partner." Billing goes through them and that reduces our charges. In addition, they pitch projects of ours to AWS and if they are interesting enough to AWS, AWS reduces charges for periods of time on servers related to those developments.
While we use AWS, I think the game is the same with Google or Microsoft. So, if you are looking to save some money, you may look into companies who are Advanced AWS Partners, Premier Google Partners, or Silver Microsoft Partners. It's likely they can help you out.
Is there IP transfer here? They give you a discount in exchange for knowing how you're making money?
If they see a project that seems "interesting" (ie, has a potentially to be successful and have a very high AWS spend in the future), they're willing to subsidize[0] some costs now in order for you to get used to and build around AWS, and likely build more closely to AWS. If it ends up being successful, AWS has a much larger customer.
[0] I say subsidize in quotes because I seriously doubt AWS is taking a loss on any of this, they're just not making quite as much in profit.
This thing is pretty damn straightforward and simple (which is good), and TIL from Vantage that I've been using the wrong volume type - gp3 is better and would save me money. I feel dumb not knowing, but now Vantage made me a little smarter. ;-) Three cheers for the cost savings recommendations!
If you've been dodging these calls in the past, it might be worth picking up the phone.
As for cost consumption, splitting services into separate AWS accounts (even per-environment) helps if they're large (plus then you're less likely to hit rate limits, worry about IAM segregation, etc)
Moreover, gp3 is very new (in cloud time) and most people don't use it since it's not really supported that well in cloudformation
Otherwise the title is misleading. Mods, can you update the title to be the actual title of the article?
If you have Enterprise Support, your TAMs can also help with cost and can arrange meetings and resources to address cost concerns, as well (including architectural reviews)
If you're not large enough for that to apply or don't plan for huge growth, personally, I'd strongly reconsider AWS. Amazon's APIs and infrastructure automation can give small teams a lot of leverage to run massive amounts of infrastructure and quickly scale, but things with a small, fixed set of infrastructure might be worth a look on VMs, etc
That doesn't make sense to me. Imagine you're paying ~$50,000/month for AWS and make good use of its features (of course if you're just running EC2 instances, using AWS adds little value). While that might sound costly, in my opinion it's still way too little to justify the additional $10,000/month Enterprise Support would cost. Using Enterprise Support would increase the bill by 20% in this case!
In my opinion Enterprise Support only makes sense if your monthly AWS bill is close to or more than $150,000/month, as otherwise Enterprise Support is a quite expensive additional item on the bill, or if you require the additional escalation possibilities in case of problems that come with Enterprise Support.
imo it might make sense at that point to consider other options. AWS definitely isn't cheap and $50k/mon is a lot on infrastructure for "free" support. I don't think AWS Support makes sense at that price (unless you're going to heavily leverage it) but I'm also not sure running $50k infra on AWS makes a lot of sense either
Nice, but time zone matters - depending on where both you and they are based, that could have just been normal 9-5 making it seem better than the reality... Not detracting from the fact that it got resolved promptly of course.
Pricing seems to be similar to DigitalOcean, however there seems to be more resources allocated.
We worked with a client and analyzed their workload and software. With a few minor changes we could reduce their always on EC2 instances with 66%. They where not interested. Then at least buy reserved instances? Nope, also not interested.
(aws has a useful place and a use, but obviously spawning a new vm for every query would just maximise cost over time)
* this advice does not apply if you're a cog in an enterprise, then use whatever the company mandates
Here's a few alternatives, from the most expensive to the least expensive:
DigitalOcean: https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/ A pretty popular VPS provider that i'd say is cheaper than the above to start us out. They also offer a whole bunch of different managed services, if you're into that sort of stuff.
Vultr: https://www.vultr.com/products/cloud-compute/#pricing Much like DigitalOcean, sans some of the managed services. On the upside, they also sell smaller instances, though those tend to be sold out in my experience.
Scaleway: https://www.scaleway.com/en/pricing/ Have a look at their Development or Starburst instances (the latter are smaller ones like Vultr), also they rival DigitalOcean in their managed offerings. Pretty good CPU performance as well, in my experience.
Hetzner: https://www.hetzner.com/cloud I'd say that they're cheaper than all of the above, but also have a reasonably modern control panel, as well as block storage services if you need more space. ID verification might be necessary if you're from an undesireable country, though, so YMMV.
Time4VPS: https://www.time4vps.com/?affid=5294 I have used them for almost all of my servers in the last 4 years or so (hence affiliate link in case you check them out) - the control panel is somewhat more dated and the managed offerings are limited, but they're one of the cheapest legitimate hosts, since they're owned by a Lithuanian telco. They also offer noticeable discounts if you reserve instances for a year and i'd say they're a good choice for most purposes, provided that you have backups (i have a few backup servers in my home for that purpose).
Contabo: https://contabo.com/en/vps/ Perhaps the best specs that you can get on the cheap, especially if you're after a decent amount of storage, which is larger than most of the other hosts provide you with (in lieu of block storage services). They do have a setup fee for the instances, the process seems at least partially manual on their part, the web UI is the most antiquated i've seen of the bunch, the performance of the instances is mediocre (they probably overprovision), but it all seems to work regardless.
There are also other hosts out there, but the shadier they are, the more likely data loss and/or theft is. But hey, balance your needs with your capabilities to find what works the best for you! Perhaps i'll even write a blog post and include some automated benchmarks in the future on my blog.
Edit: if you feel like spending some of your time looking for bargains (yaay for low alternative costs), then feel free to have a look at LowEndBox, where interesting deals are sometimes advertised: https://lowendbox.com/
Personally, however, i'd only pick companies that have been around for $SOME years.
These "Cloud" systems provide a number of advantages over VPS providers. They have a standard programmable interface and command-line tools, they provide many services you may or may not get with a given VPS provider (programmable networks, load balancers, object and block storage, secrets management, configurable user/role access controls, etc). They also of course allow you to scale your resources programmatically and may provide pay-as-you-go pricing. And if it's something you're into, you can typically find a Terraform provider that works with it.
Slightly more expensive than a simple VPS, but the automation, failure recovery, and security gains can be significant.
I guess the only other alternative is to look for the lowest common denominator, which in the case of Linux servers is typically something like Ansible/Salt - to connect to VPSes through SSH and do all of the necessary configuration from bottom up in an automated and repeatable manner.
Of course, that's not to say that it's always easy and i applaud what OpenStack is trying to do with providing APIs for a lot of that stuff.
Additionally, we've built an API for the data served through it: https://vantage.readme.io/reference
We have future plans to develop the site but I just want to ensure I'm aware of what you're referring to if you're seeing something we aren't aware of. Please feel free to email me directly at ben@vantage.sh if you'd like.
First is the simple test case using something random like Lambda and S3 after dragging through the Whizlabs course. This costs you $5 a month.
Second is the migration of something not particularly complicated but a bit meatier which works out cheaper than your capital expenditure coming up so you can write it off without having to fill in a purchase order and argue with accounts again.
Third is the overconfident architectural approach of multi-account, multi-AZ with peering all over the shop as recommended in the best practices, certification and architecture documentation. Approving nods all around on delivering this, despite the operational expenditure being slightly higher than predicted on your hacked up and not totally complete Excel spreadsheet for cost management.
Fourth is the first bill. This immediately points out your inter-VPC, inter-AZ transit and shitty shared tenancy CPU provision you had to crank up quickly at the last minute, costs more a month than your entire infrastructure capex for 3 years did before you got AWS resulting in sad kitty faces all around and a scramble for a cheaper option while trying not to get fired. This is all while Bezos dances on the flames coming from the dollar bills he's burning in a giant bonfire cackling loudly.
Fifth is several months later after being on the job market, eating ramen and searching for a company which "doesn't do any of that cloud stuff". You eventually find a position herding a couple of 1U supermicro boxes with CentOS on them which require the odd disk replacing here and there and some PHP updating without going near Terraform, Jenkins or any of that shit. Your entire infrastructure upgrade is automating your entire job into a few ansible playbooks and spending 6 hours a day inspecting the insides of your eyelids.
Yet another classic SV-style rugpull.
But you are right, running on AWS isn’t cheaper. It can be, but you have to design your software to take advantage of the platform.
