Hi Roger,
Thanks for responding so quickly!
On 08/12/13 18:29, Roger Dingledine wrote:
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.
I did indeed mean storage. At least on eu-west-1 (Ireland), you get a free disk space allocation of 30GB-months for each month. With my 1024 GB, I had used that up in 30/1024 of a month, or about 21 hours. After that I started being charged.
Everything else I used was within the free allowance (eg I used about 900,000 io requests out of an allowance of 2 million). My bill was quite clearly itemized!
So ... if you've recently set up an AWS EC2 cloud relay with the Tor AMI, check your storage, and your billing!
Are you setting up a relay or a bridge?
I left it as the default AMI loaded by the tor-project website. The only torrc changes I made were to change the nickname and to put in some ContactInfo.
In any case, I think the tor-project website AWS screenshots urgently need to be changed to reflect the current setup procedure, with a warning not to accept the 1024 GB default and an explicit recommendation about the amount of storage to ask for (was my guess of 10 GB reasonable?).
Yuck. I have worried since the beginning of the 'cloud bridge' project that we were just signing people up for a future bait-and-switch by the enormous uncaring for-profit company. But then, I figured I was just a cloud hater so I should let people move forward with their vision of the future. :)
Well, we know the free offer only lasts for a year after you first open your AWS account. And I might well consider paying after that, if the first year goes well.
Sorry you got bitten. :(
Worth it for the experience, I say. And more worth it if I can share that experience ...
Thanks again,
Nick