Nick Sheppard nshep@attglobal.net wrote: :Hi all, : :I set up an AWS EC2 cloud Tor relay a month ago and made an expensive :mistake. Perhaps others may learn from my example! : :I followed the instructions on the tor-project website, and found that :it actually is quite a simple process, as it says. I did notice that :the AWS setup screens I was seeing were different from the screenshots :on the website, but they were asking me similar questions so I just :went :with the defaults where the website said "No changes". I didn't look :closely enough. : :Everything went to plan and I watched the relay work for a month. :However, on the AWS EC2 Management console I neglected to click on :"Services" then "Billing" to see how much they were charging me. : :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 ... : :There doesn't seem to be any way of shrinking the storage of an :existing :instance (though it can be expanded, now, with EBS, Elastic Block :Storage), so I had to terminate it (which deletes the storage) and :create another instance with a more reasonable 10 GB (of which df tells : :me I'm now using 11%). : :So ... if you've recently set up an AWS EC2 cloud relay with the Tor :AMI, check your storage, and your billing! : :I think the option to specify your storage amount (with its default of :1024 GB) may have been introduced when AWS introduce EBS instead of :just :instance-backed storage (which may have defaulted to the size of the :AMI??). : :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?). : :Oh well, I have gained 100 dollars worth of wisdom from the episode. My : :way of "Don't look too closely, and hope for the best at the end of the : :month" was *not* a good idea. : :Nick Sheppard :_______________________________________________ :tor-relays mailing list :tor-relays@lists.torproject.org :https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-relays
Thanks for sharing this. I, too, followed the guide on torproject.org; however, at the last page where you review and create the instance there was a warning notifying me that my setup wasn't eligible for the free deal. No matter what I altered, I couldn't get the free offer. So, I decided against creating the instance. I'll have to have another look. I also noticed the images on torproject.org were outdated. It would be good to have that addressed.