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Comment by Jdam | Hacker News Reader

You probably didn't evaluate Spot prices. I wrote a tool once to evaluate current AWS spot prices against the Ethereum price and sometimes it was a low as losing 2 cents per hour and G2 instance.

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AWS is by far the most profitable business unit at Amazon, with margins consistently in the 25% range.

https://www.recode.net/2017/4/27/15451726/amazon-q1-2017-ear...

if this is true:

> it was a low as losing 2 cents per hour

then it seems someone should be able to negotiate with you (even if not Amazon), especially if you're willing to use 1,000 or 10,000 instances - and don't need memory, etc.

it seems 2¢ should be within what you might be able to shave off of somewhere...

maybe not, though.

Funny side note: when I prepared for getting into all this mining and increasing G2 quota in N Virginia from 2 to 20 or so, customer support first needed to check "if this won't disrupt overall region stability". Don't know if this was bs or if scalability in Aws might be worse than we think.

Used to get told the same thing for GP2 EBS and R3.8xlarge limits in us-west-2 all the time. On a couple occasions was told no, that increasing the limit wasn't possible due to existing commitments in the region, so I'm not entirely sure if it's a canned response or actually a legit concern of theirs.

We frequently request account limit increases to 1000-2000 instance limits and get the same canned response. Though I bet in the earlier days capacity allowances for GPUs was probably more sensitive.

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