[tor-relays] Setting up AWS cloud-relay - don't reserve expensive storage!

[Nick Sheppard]

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?
>
> https://www.torproject.org/docs/faq#RelayOrBridge
>

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