HOW-TO: Reneg on a promise to write an AWS How-To
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This is how I started writing my how-to on AWS:
So you want to run a MU*, for free, for a year?
OK, first things first:
KNOW UP FRONT THAT YOU WILL PAY OUT YOUR BUTTHOLE IF YOU GO OVER, AND NOBODY CARES THAT YOU DID NOT INTEND TO!!!!!
You are entering your credit card info in this process, so if you have any doubt whatsoever in the slightest that you might not remember to cancel services in the 11th month, or that if something about that goes wrong that you can't afford the hosting, don't do this. And for God's sake, do NOT do this for someone else.
I feel like I need to say this again in another way: DO NOT go over your 750 hours!! AWS pricing is stupid expensive (because it's not intended for things that 1.) take up as few resources as a MU*, and 2.) don't make you money).
So you've read all that and you think you're responsible/financially masochistic enough to ride this dragon.And that's where I stopped. I started thinking of all the people I know from MUdom. I started thinking about me in my twenties. I started thinking about how I'd feel finding out someone had followed my AWS How-To with the very best of intentions, for some reason overran the 750 free-tier hours and were financially ruined by it (and let's be honest, a lot of us got into MUs because free was all we could afford, balancing on a razor's edge financially).
I can't mentally or emotionally handle that. Thinking about it makes me physically ill.
Even moreso, one of the very few demands my God puts on me is to love others. It's not my problem if you get yourself into trouble... but it's not very loving if I give you instructions I know have a real chance of causing you ruin.Yeah, I recall @Cheesegrater mentioned it's not that expensive... That's awesome, but with the byzantine options provided at this point to me I can't see how he gets the price he pays, and so I can't in good conscience at all help people get embroiled into something I can't get them out of and can't be sure they won't get themselves into trouble with.
So my how-to is simple: If you want to use AWS for hosting a MU*, it's possible. The licensing is byzantine, but the Free Tier stuff is marked pretty well. You want a Red Hat LINUX distro, you'll need to set up a certificate in PuTTY (they have instructions), SSH in and sudo-yum a developer package, and you're on your way.
If you have the wherewithal to figure it out from there, you'll have the wherewithal to figure out how not to get yourself in trouble.
Sorry guys, I know I essentially promised a few of you a guide. It just gives me the willies thinking about how badly this could turn out, and I figured I could at least give that explanation.
In summary, AWS is a valid option for running a MU in test/dev/pilot-program... if you can figure it out yourself. IMO you're better off running TinyMUX on Windows, or signing up for some of the low cost options like Linode or DigitalOcean.
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@Jim-Nanban said in HOW-TO: Reneg on a promise to write an AWS How-To:
Yeah, I recall @Cheesegrater mentioned it's not that expensive... That's awesome, but with the byzantine options provided at this point to me I can't see how he gets the price he pays, and so I can't in good conscience at all help people get embroiled into something I can't get them out of and can't be sure they won't get themselves into trouble with.
Here's my price breakdown for one instance, which is all you need for a MU*.
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud running Linux/UNIX Reserved Instances
USD 0.006 per Linux/UNIX (Amazon VPC), t2.micro instance-hour (or partial hour) 744 Hrs $4.46EBS
$0.05 per 1 million I/O requests - US West (Oregon) 885,105 IOs $0.04
$0.05 per GB-month of Magnetic provisioned storage - US West (Oregon) 23.000 GB-Mo $1.15
$0.095 per GB-Month of snapshot data stored - US West (Oregon) 10.837 GB-Mo $1.03
Total: $2.22Total for instance $6.68.
I pay a little bit more (pennies) for bandwidth.
If you run on-demand instead of reserved it will cost you about double that, but reserved has a minimum contract term. Up to you.
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What is this thread?
I had to google what AWS was. Who is paying out their ass for anything? We run Fallen Worlds on Digital Ocean and we pay something like $10/mo. (And by we, I mean Elphaba, the game owner.) BITN was like $8/mo and $15 for the domain name for a year.
I'm lost.
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@skew BITN was on DigitalOcean for $10/mo + $2/mo for automatic backups, but yeah. It's not a huge difference, but I grok @Jim-Nanban's concern re: piecemeal costs and a confusing configuration. (Something set and steady you can plan and prep for is definitely better for me, anyway.)
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@skew said in HOW-TO: Reneg on a promise to write an AWS How-To:
What is this thread?
[...]
I'm lost.Hey, buddy! Welcome to the thread!
This is a followup on my other thread here: http://musoapbox.net/topic/1546/aws-amazon-web-service-as-mu-hosting/
People had expressed interest there, and in PMs, and in chats elsewhere, about what I did to get a MUSH up on AWS Free Tier. I had told them that I would write a how-to... But as said, the guidance I could give was insufficient to mitigate the potential risks of a mistake.@Cheesegrater above has a good breakdown of how to avoid those problems. It's much less dire, given that info... but given all the other options at comparable cost, it's just not worth the potential trouble to me. If/when I go to Linode or whatever, I'll write that how-to instead.
So that's what this is!
