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Comment by andrewstuart | Hacker News Reader

Also, I felt that Amazon was playing sketchy little games with spot instances.

It's not impossible but quite technically challenging to find out how much you are actually paying for a spot instance.

It felt really dodgy to me that I might have started a spot instance thinking I was paying the minimum listed rate but somewhere amongst the formulas and terms and conditions AWS actually decided I would be paying maximum rate.

They don't actually tell you up front what your spot instance are costing, no doubt it would not be hard for them to do so, but it seems a deliberate strategy to hide this information.

It's just not worth the game playing when self hosting or renting a server from Ionos is cheaper and takes away the uncertainty.

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Comparing with self-hosting or renting a server is just dishonest. At that point you may as well compare with spinning up an actual EC2 instance. Your alternatives miss the main original value proposition of EC2 altogether, let alone spot instances.

>> the main original value proposition of EC2

Which is?

I don't really buy the idea that companies can't afford to run their own computers due to hardware and infrastructure costs, and that clouds don't require hiring or specialised technical experts.

Pay per second Linux boxes with public IPs. A lot of the VPS/server hosts I used in the past took minutes to boot an instance and billed you by the hour (or maybe by the month, although that was uncommon), not so with EC2.

There’s much less value if you never need to scale of course, which is true of 90% of businesses. But doing a dumb experiment on a 10 cent spot instance for an hour where it would’ve taken a week to arrange space on the company VMWare box? That is awesome.

EC2 was billed by the hour initially. Minimum one hour charge as soon as you started an instance. It was still better than the alternatives; nobody else had per-hour billing with no commitments in 2006. Moving to per-second billing was a much later change (in 2017).

> Pay per second Linux boxes with public IPs. A lot of the VPS/server hosts I used in the past took minutes to boot an instance and billed you by the hour (or maybe by the month, although that was uncommon), not so with EC2.

It's only worth it if the pay-per-second box has an equivalent or better cost-performance ratio than the "legacy" alternative, otherwise it's still cheaper to get one "legacy" VPS/dedicated server, use it for 10 seconds and let the rest go to "waste".

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