Howdy, Stranger!

It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!


Reselling Lightsail
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.

Reselling Lightsail

Anyone here doing it? Do I need a special account and qualifications/approvals or anything?

Are there any alternatives? The main thing is that I want to boot from block storage, not local storage like what DigitalOcean does.

«1

Comments

  • MikeAMikeA Member, Patron Provider

    be careful with high bandwidth overages.

  • edited December 2020

    @MikeA said:
    be careful with high bandwidth overages.

    They give you 2TB on a $5 plan which should be plenty for what I do. I won't be using the premium data transfer datacenters (Mumbai & Sidney).

  • brueggusbrueggus Member, IPv6 Advocate

    @MikeA said:
    be careful with high bandwidth overages.

    ..and be careful with abuse. Depending on the type of abuse, they might shut down your whole operation on short notice.

  • MikeAMikeA Member, Patron Provider

    @LosPollosHermanos said:

    @MikeA said:
    be careful with high bandwidth overages.

    They give you 2TB on a $5 plan which should be plenty for what I do. I won't be using the premium data transfer datacenters (Mumbai & Sidney).

    My point of mentioning it was that, since you said you want to resell it, if one client sends out 10TB you're going to have a pretty big bill.

  • edited December 2020

    @MikeA said:

    @LosPollosHermanos said:

    @MikeA said:
    be careful with high bandwidth overages.

    They give you 2TB on a $5 plan which should be plenty for what I do. I won't be using the premium data transfer datacenters (Mumbai & Sidney).

    My point of mentioning it was that, since you said you want to resell it, if one client sends out 10TB you're going to have a pretty big bill.

    Thanks for pointing that out. I would probably just state that anything over 2TB usage would be billed extra. After several years of doing this I have yet to have a bandwidth abuse situation happen for what I am doing so I am not too concerned about it.

  • edited December 2020

    Turns out they have a bunch of requirements unfortunately. You need at least 2 people with AWS certifications and some minimal billing and you are also forced to pay for a business support plan. All kind of a dealbreaker for me unfortunately. I didn't realize they want you to jump through all these hoops. I'll have to take my business elsewhere.

    Any good alternatives without all the hoops? The main thing is I want the virtual servers to boot from block storage. I don't want to have to set up my own OpenStack and Ceph servers so I'm looking for something like Lightsail where that is all done for you. DigitalOcean and Vult boot from local storage so they are not viable options.

  • LunaNode? They have everything you need and more.

  • MikeAMikeA Member, Patron Provider

    @LosPollosHermanos said:
    Any good alternatives without all the hoops? The main thing is I want the virtual servers to boot from block storage.

    You can boot from block storage on Linode servers, but it requires copying the default primary disk first it looks like.

  • edited December 2020

    Looks like some of my existing datacenter providers can do this and don't have any hoops. Some of them even have their own WHMCS module so I don't have to buy one like I would have to for Lightsail. I'm sure Amazon will get over it but they did a good job scaring away my business.

  • @MikeA said:

    @LosPollosHermanos said:
    Any good alternatives without all the hoops? The main thing is I want the virtual servers to boot from block storage.

    You can boot from block storage on Linode servers, but it requires copying the default primary disk first it looks like.

    Thanks for the heads up about Linode. I will have a look at that.

  • edited January 2021

    It's still not clear to me if I can resell Lightsail or not. I looked at other providers and LightSail still comes out much cheaper as a true block storage cloud VPS. Most others cost at least twice as much for similar specs and I doubt they have anywhere close to the network capacity Amazon has.

    There are LightSail addons for platforms like HostBill and WHMCS so I am assuming lots of people are doing this without jumping through their partner program hoops. Just using a regular Amazon account.

    I even talked to one of Amazon's customer contact specialists (or whatever they are called) and he wasn't sure either. Said he would look into it and still hasn't gotten back to me. I read through the terms of service and there was nothing specifically in there that I could find that said I could not do it.

  • raindog308raindog308 Administrator, Veteran

    @LosPollosHermanos said: I looked at other providers and LightSail still comes out much cheaper as a true block storage cloud VPS.

    Their price for a 1GB/1cpu VPS is the same as Vultr, Digital Ocean, and Linode except you get 2TB of bandwidth instead of 1TB. All three of those providers offer block storage at the same price as Amazon. I guess if you're really focused on bandwidth, Lightsail is significantly chaper but otherwise it's pretty plain jane.

    What kind of reselling are you planning on doing?

  • @LosPollosHermanos said:
    It's still not clear to me if I can resell Lightsail or not. I looked at other providers and LightSail still comes out much cheaper as a true block storage cloud VPS. Most others cost at least twice as much for similar specs and I doubt they have anywhere close to the network capacity Amazon has.

    There are LightSail addons for platforms like HostBill and WHMCS so I am assuming lots of people are doing this without jumping through their partner program hoops. Just using a regular Amazon account.

    I even talked to one of Amazon's customer contact specialists (or whatever they are called) and he wasn't sure either. Said he would look into it and still hasn't gotten back to me. I read through the terms of service and there was nothing specifically in there that I could find that said I could not do it.

    Only thing I would be careful of is if you aren't a registered partner, any activity on those VMs is going to be assumed to be you - If they see regular abuse from your VMs it's highly likely they'll just outright kick you off without warning.

  • edited January 2021

    @raindog308 said:

    @LosPollosHermanos said: I looked at other providers and LightSail still comes out much cheaper as a true block storage cloud VPS.

    Their price for a 1GB/1cpu VPS is the same as Vultr, Digital Ocean, and Linode except you get 2TB of bandwidth instead of 1TB. All three of those providers offer block storage at the same price as Amazon. I guess if you're really focused on bandwidth, Lightsail is significantly chaper but otherwise it's pretty plain jane.

    What kind of reselling are you planning on doing?

    Vultr/DO/Linode boot from local storage. So it's an apples and oranges comparison. You can add block storage to those services but you cannot boot from block storage and/or completely forgo local storage. That is one of the things that makes them different when compared to true cloud services like those offered by AWS/Google/Azure etc. LightSail boots from block storage so it is a true cloud service.

    That is kind of why DO always tries to call themselves a developer service. Local storage is better (ie. faster) for development. Block storage is better for production because it protects you from component failure and is highly available, durable, and scalable.

  • raindog308raindog308 Administrator, Veteran

    @LosPollosHermanos said: Vultr/DO/Linode boot from local storage, not block storage. So it's an apples and oranges comparison. You can add block storage to those services but you cannot boot from block storage and/or completely forgo local storage. That is one of the things that makes them different and theoretically less reliable than true cloud providers like AWS/Google/Azure etc. LightSail boots from block storage so it is a true cloud service.

    Meh - that's a pretty abstract advantage. Not even sure it's truly an advantage. RAID disk on the other end of a network line vs. local RAID disk seems like a wash to me.

    Thanked by 1darkimmortal
  • edited January 2021

    @raindog308 said:

    @LosPollosHermanos said: Vultr/DO/Linode boot from local storage, not block storage. So it's an apples and oranges comparison. You can add block storage to those services but you cannot boot from block storage and/or completely forgo local storage. That is one of the things that makes them different and theoretically less reliable than true cloud providers like AWS/Google/Azure etc. LightSail boots from block storage so it is a true cloud service.

    Meh - that's a pretty abstract advantage. Not even sure it's truly an advantage. RAID disk on the other end of a network line vs. local RAID disk seems like a wash to me.

    What happens when your physical DO server dies for any one of hundreds of different reasons that local RAID will not protect you from? Or they need to perform power down maintenance on the physical server? Or maybe they need to retire the server? Or or or?

    When that happens on a Google Cloud Compute instance it automatically reboots onto different hardware, unless you opt-out of that feature. You are still booting from the same virtual boot disk and your public IP addess does not change so no affect on your service other than the reboot. I'm assuming it's similar with LightSail.

    If snapshots are good enough for you in a hardware failure scenario then by all means use DO. I use them myself for some stuff. What I am specifically asking about here is true cloud alternatives that boot from block storage because I want to offer both types of service.

  • edited January 2021

    @WSCallum said:

    @LosPollosHermanos said:
    It's still not clear to me if I can resell Lightsail or not. I looked at other providers and LightSail still comes out much cheaper as a true block storage cloud VPS. Most others cost at least twice as much for similar specs and I doubt they have anywhere close to the network capacity Amazon has.

    There are LightSail addons for platforms like HostBill and WHMCS so I am assuming lots of people are doing this without jumping through their partner program hoops. Just using a regular Amazon account.

    I even talked to one of Amazon's customer contact specialists (or whatever they are called) and he wasn't sure either. Said he would look into it and still hasn't gotten back to me. I read through the terms of service and there was nothing specifically in there that I could find that said I could not do it.

    Only thing I would be careful of is if you aren't a registered partner, any activity on those VMs is going to be assumed to be you - If they see regular abuse from your VMs it's highly likely they'll just outright kick you off without warning.

    If it did happen it would be isolated to individual VM's and that would most likely only be if they were hacked. So I'm not too concerned with that.

  • exception0x876exception0x876 Member, Host Rep, LIR

    @LosPollosHermanos said:
    What happens when your physical DO server dies for any one of hundreds of different reasons that local RAID will not protect you from?

    If server dies the data can still be migrated to other server in most cases.

    @LosPollosHermanos said:
    Or they need to perform power down maintenance on the physical server? Or maybe they need to retire the server? Or or or?

    In this case providers usually do live migration to other node first i.e. OVH does this, I can see that my VM was migrated a few times in the last few years without a downtime.

  • @LosPollosHermanos said:

    @raindog308 said:

    @LosPollosHermanos said: I looked at other providers and LightSail still comes out much cheaper as a true block storage cloud VPS.

    Their price for a 1GB/1cpu VPS is the same as Vultr, Digital Ocean, and Linode except you get 2TB of bandwidth instead of 1TB. All three of those providers offer block storage at the same price as Amazon. I guess if you're really focused on bandwidth, Lightsail is significantly chaper but otherwise it's pretty plain jane.

    What kind of reselling are you planning on doing?

    Vultr/DO/Linode boot from local storage. So it's an apples and oranges comparison. You can add block storage to those services but you cannot boot from block storage and/or completely forgo local storage. That is one of the things that makes them different when compared to true cloud services like those offered by AWS/Google/Azure etc. LightSail boots from block storage so it is a true cloud service.

    That is kind of why DO always tries to call themselves a developer service. Local storage is better (ie. faster) for development. Block storage is better for production because it protects you from component failure and is highly available, durable, and scalable.

    Hetzner Cloud offer VPS with CEPH storage, when your node fail, they migrate the other node.

  • edited January 2021

    @dragon1993 said:

    Hetzner Cloud offer VPS with CEPH storage, when your node fail, they migrate the other node.

    If it boots from CEPH then yes, that is true cloud VPS. A lot of datacenter providers offer it but they don't seem to be able to match LightSail's price and don't have the network capacity that Amazon has. Amazon rarely if ever has DDoS issues. I still see it with most of my other providers from time to time. They have automated mitigation but it usually takes several minutes to kick in.

  • jhjh Member
    edited January 2021

    FWIW AWS really don't reward resellers. No discount, no co-marketing, no leads unless you spend really really big bucks... I would recommend finding a partner that gives you something in exchange for selling their services for them.

    Every so often an AWS partner rep emails me to ask if we want to become a partner and resell their stuff, I ask if there's anything in it for us, especially since we'd be taking on the responsibility for late payers etc., and they send me some waffle that basically means no.

    OVH cloud uses Ceph if I recall. I don't know if they offer resellers anything special but at least they're dirt cheap.

    DO has block storage now and they seem to reward resellers with free credits, free priority support etc. They also reach out every so often to ask the same question as AWS but they do understand the value of channel partners.

    Thanked by 1lokuzard
  • SplitIceSplitIce Member, Host Rep

    Linode?

    I don't know if you can boot from Block Storage but in the age of Kubernetes why would it matter? Just mount your block storage and use a generic disk image for boot.

  • Lightsail is the dumbed down version of AWS , is not the same. You talking HA on Lightsail but you are speculating. Last time I checked Lightsail was just VPSes. I believe for HA you might have to go full AWS regular service. And believe it... is not as cheap as the alternative. Might as well consider Azure then. LOL

  • gksgks Member

    @LosPollosHermanos said:

    @MikeA said:
    be careful with high bandwidth overages.

    They give you 2TB on a $5 plan which should be plenty for what I do. I won't be using the premium data transfer datacenters (Mumbai & Sidney).

    is it not 1 TB for $5 in other locations?

  • I remember testing disk io read/write speed for Lightsail and it was slow compared to others like DO, OVH.

    UPCloud allows you to boot from Storage, but so do many other providers who advertise at LET, too.

  • @jh said:
    FWIW AWS really don't reward resellers. No discount, no co-marketing, no leads unless you spend really really big bucks... I would recommend finding a partner that gives you something in exchange for selling their services for them.

    Every so often an AWS partner rep emails me to ask if we want to become a partner and resell their stuff, I ask if there's anything in it for us, especially since we'd be taking on the responsibility for late payers etc., and they send me some waffle that basically means no.

    OVH cloud uses Ceph if I recall. I don't know if they offer resellers anything special but at least they're dirt cheap.

    DO has block storage now and they seem to reward resellers with free credits, free priority support etc. They also reach out every so often to ask the same question as AWS but they do understand the value of channel partners.

    You do get a discount with the AWS partner program. Not sure if you get a discount on LightSail but I think you do on EC2. However, I think you also have to pay for a business level support plan.

  • edited January 2021

    @SplitIce said:
    Linode?

    I don't know if you can boot from Block Storage but in the age of Kubernetes why would it matter? Just mount your block storage and use a generic disk image for boot.

    Kubernates is not a ones size fits all solution. For what I do I don't have any use for Kubernetes/Docker.

  • edited January 2021

    @Hxxx said:
    Lightsail is the dumbed down version of AWS , is not the same. You talking HA on Lightsail but you are speculating. Last time I checked Lightsail was just VPSes. I believe for HA you might have to go full AWS regular service. And believe it... is not as cheap as the alternative. Might as well consider Azure then. LOL

    It's not just a VPS. It's a VPS that boots from block storage which is an important difference when compared to something like DO/Vultr.

    The billing is dumbed down and that is one of the things I like about it. Especially for reselling. I know that the cost will be the cost up to 2TB of data usage. As far as I know it's the same as an EC2 server. Just less configurable features.

  • edited January 2021

    @HostXNow said:
    I remember testing disk io read/write speed for Lightsail and it was slow compared to others like DO, OVH.

    UPCloud allows you to boot from Storage, but so do many other providers who advertise at LET, too.

    That is because block storage is slower than local storage which should not be a surprise to anyone.

    Local storage is better for development. When I do "composer update" on block storage it usually takes quite awhile but on local storage it's sometimes only a few seconds. During development that is an issue but in production it is not. So I prefer using something like DO for development.

  • IIRC isnt that in lightsail you can only have a total of 20 instances and 5 static IPs.

Sign In or Register to comment.