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

[Nick Sheppard]

On 08/12/13 23:22, Runa A. Sandvik wrote:
> On Sun, Dec 8, 2013 at 10:26 PM, Nick Sheppard <nshep at 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 ...

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.

All the best, and thanks again Runa and AWS,

Nick Sheppard