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

[Nick Sheppard]

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 ...

... I think in the back of my mind I had an idea that this was The 
Cloud, a sort of ideal elastic resource where you would only pay for 
what you used.  Well, not where AWS EBS storage is concerned!

Nick Sheppard