On Mon, Dec 9, 2013 at 1:49 AM, Nick Sheppard nshep@attglobal.net wrote:
On 08/12/13 23:22, Runa A. Sandvik wrote:
On Sun, Dec 8, 2013 at 10:26 PM, Nick Sheppard nshep@attglobal.net wrote:
On 08/12/13 19:02, Nick wrote:
Quoth Roger Dingledine:
On Sun, Dec 08, 2013 at 04:00:06PM +0000, Nick Sheppard wrote:
At the end of the month I got a bill for 120 dollars. And Amazon were quite right - they were charging me for the 1024 GB of storage I had accidentally asked for by not changing the default when I set up the instance. The first 30 GB were free, the other 994 I was paying for. And I was only actually using 1.5 GB ...
*Storage*? As in, disk space? Surely you mean bandwidth, but you seem quite clearly to mean disk space, so I'm confused.
Sounds to me like Amazon decided the instance should be given 1024GB of disk space by default, regardless of the fact that it (obviously) remained completely unused.
Nick, if Amazon were a reasonable company that certainly ought to be the sort of thing you could say "I didn't realise, it was misleading, and I didn't use the offered space, please refund me". However given their love of automation and robotic offerings I suspect such pleas would be ignored.
Nice idea, but I don't think I'd have a case. The 1024 GB is there on the setup screen (at least it is for eu-west-1), there were many ways I could have seen how much unused storage I had, I could have checked my bill more often, I could easily have set up an email alert for when the bill passed a set threshold ...
@AWSSupport replied to my tweet saying they have reached out to you via the AWS Support Center at https://aws.amazon.com/support.
... and not only did they reach out to me, they immediately gave me a full refund. So a big thank-you to Runa for your very effective tweet! :) :) :) Perhaps this will persuade Roger Dingledine that the folks at AWS love kittens and rainbows as much as we do ...
Great, glad I could help!
However (for there is a "however") I'm now even more puzzled by the default settings. Mickey N at AWS replied that:
"It's my understanding that when a Linux/RHEL instances are launched, the default amount of EBS storage in every region is set to 6GB. ... I've attached a screenshot of the Management Console page where the default 6GB is displayed."
And the 6 is in exactly the same place where we see 4 (on us-east-1) and 1024 elsewhere. I've pointed this out to AWS. I have no idea what's happening here.
I have a support ticket open and have been talking to Mickey about this. It seems all the instances, excluding us-east-1, were created with storage space set to 1024 GB. This is interesting because I only ever created one instance, us-east-1, and then used the AMI copy function [1] to copy the instance to the other regions.
I will write an update when I hear back/when this issue has been resolved.
[1]: http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2013/03/12/announcing-ami-copy-for...