New on LowEndTalk? Please Register and read our Community Rules.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
Amazon Lightsail (Now with Windows)
Looks like Amazon Lightsail (AWS hosting bundled/priced more like traditional VPS) is now offering Windows. You know, for those who are into that sort of thing. Also, of course, Linux.
Pricing isn't exactly LEB-friendly, but it's now in a lot more locations (including Mumbai, Sydney, Singapore, & Tokyo) and you get a free month to try it out. Anyone tried this product yet? (I'm especially curious how it compares to using Workspaces, which was a real PITA to set up and too expensive for my humble pocketbook.)
Thanked by 1alice2k
Comments
Those clowns still don't support IPv6, but running Windows on a server, wow this must be really high priority.
??? I have IPv6 on my ELBs
So you're saying Windows shouldn't be high priority? Nobody I know even gives 2 shits about IPv6 and my entire stack is on Windows.
What are "ELBs" and are those what you buy from Amazon Lightsail?
Nope? Thought so.
you can always switch over to ec2 btw
I never understood why people prefer to keep windows VPS unless it's for domain purposes. They make poor public facing servers IMO.
Try and convince these small businesses who rely on everything-windows.
It's just what they got with their computer and they don't know anything else.
SSH command line is scary, let's just use Windows on a VPS, it is GUI so can just point and click on stuff till it somehow works.
Fair enough.. Although Xfce does a reasonable job of providing a GUI it is limited in management. With that said are people just unaware that there are open source free web based server management platforms? Windows VPS sounds like an unsecured resource hog..
linux gui still sucks compared windows
In which way?
Here's a viewpoint from being somewhere where we have huge AWS (and Azure, and GCP) deployments.
Intentionally: we do not want publicly routable IP space for the vast majority of servers. All traffic exits/enters through a set of large proxies that scrub and watch for PII or data exfiltration and canaries. TLS is terminated at specific ingress clusters, not individually by every VM. Most servers do not even have the ability to resolve public DNS hostnames unless they have a good reason, for data exfiltration reasons. IPv6 has never been a "business need" here. Loadbalancers are used internally for all things like database services; the underlying individual servers are abstracted out and live or die by the minute. k8s/spinnaker/etc is the normal, individually sshing anywhere is considered really bad. Pretty much the anti-lowendbox. Nothing is treated like a VPS. If I want to run a small custom service like piwik, I write a helm chart and hand it off to the cluster to schedule in - if I just grab a small VM and boot it it will get destroyed at random later on.
Many of the windows servers don't have a GUI installed (Server Core), less attack surface for services like AD and internal DNS resolution for a group of specific hosts.
Also have a lot of .NET Core apps running in Ubuntu. And a surprising amount of BSDs.
Small businesses? I've worked in accounts for Bain and McKinsey, both use Windows. Which world do you live in?
SSH command line is scary, let's just use Windows on a VPS, it is GUI so can just point and click on stuff till it somehow works.
Bullshit. People run Windows because...they have applications that run on Windows.
why would anyone use this and not digitalocean??
Your username is inappropriate. One can discuss facial cumshots here, but we do not call ourselves like that. This is a gentlemen's club. Please register again under a different username. Thank you. Ah - and please don't come back as 'hairless cunt', that's not gentleman-like either.
BTW, let's suppose you wanted to run a typical web server stack. Let's say that's web server and database server.
On Linux, I could get something going with nginx, mysql, and php-fpm on a 128MB LEB. It wouldn't scale very far, but it's fine for dev use. freevps.us ran on I think a 192MB or 256MB for years in production. If this was a Wordpress blog with modest traffic, a 512 can easily handle it.
For Windows, I need IIS and (a) use MySQL/Pg, (b) spend $$$$$ licensing SQL Server, (c) don't license SQL Server and just say we did, or (d) run SQL Express. Regardless, web + DB isn't going to run on 512MB on Windows Server...is it? @Francisco says 1GB might be enough. I'm curious what a typical low end Windows webserver would look like.
I'm assuming Windows on its own takes substantially more resources than Linux but could be wrong.
In my tests you can login to the server at 512MB on 2008/2012, but doing anything is WELCOME TO PAGEFILE.
Francisco
Other than Bezos, this thread needs more dicks.
Ubuntu desktop was good, till they added unity. RIP.
Exactly.
Although I don't personally use Windows... I welcome this change. I like seeing Amazon expand their Lightsail offering.
Yup. Sometimes you have a customer who needs to run some POS software that only runs on Windows. What are you going to do? Or maybe you have no choice but to work with a vendor who only supports Windows, as was the case when I was briefly a realtor. Or maybe your employer insists on running some Windows software...
Yup. AWS finally got with the program this past year.
Point is that Lightsail is not AWS and it does not have IPv6.
Why is everyone against Windows server? Have you thought of preferences? It's good to have alternatives.
For instance, I absolutely love PRTG (it's a network monitor) and is only available on Windows. Even though I have many linux servers, sometimes it's difficult to replace something you're so used to having around.
Majority ATM use Windows.
It's like asking what's wrong with eating feces from the toilet, with the same commonplace generic b/s about "preference" and "alternatives".
Use a knife and fork, you fucking millennial.
#fuckbezos
Beginning with Ubuntu 17.10 (very soon!), Gnome is back and Unity is gone.
I can definitely see the use of a windows server behind a VPN, especially if you need to support a multi location business via domain services or other services that make managing many windows computers much easier.
With that said opening up windows to the public for IIS or any other windows services is playing with fire. Sure you can run Windows server headless lock it down and use X for remote application access or powershell but your still running windows underneath it, and unfortunately that means you'll be spending more $ on everything software related and at the mercy of Microsoft and their upgrade process.
In the end you end up paying more, getting the same or less in terms of reliability and software options, while eating resources like its free.
I can easily run and manage a windows server headless similar to a linux based server. But I'll never have a windows server front facing unless I want a honeypot to test out new anti-measures.