I’ve never felt surprised by pricing. Cost has been surprising, but that happens when usage is surprising in my experience.
They absolutely could to you a base price on the ec2 setup page, but they don't. And I have been absolutely surprised by pricing. Services that do almost nothing could cost more than your ec2.
I've been working with AWS for nearly 10 years. Many people I know, both small and large, just don't even use the console. If I need to figure out how much a project costs I use the AWS pricing calculator. Having an ec2 pricing on the pricing page is meaningless once you spend any meaningful amount of time in AWS. Once you add discounts and reserved instances, that number is going to be inaccurate anyways.
If you just need a VPS provider, there are better, less complex options. I find these complaints kind of like stepping into an F1 car and complaining that the F1 car is deceiving you because theres no fuel gauge.
> If you just need a VPS provider, there are better, less complex options. I find these complaints kind of like stepping into an F1 car and complaining that the F1 car is deceiving you because theres no fuel gauge
That's fine if you feel that way. The article and following discussion is clearly about the smaller audience, and I think you're underestimating how far up these little problems stack and scale. If a couple grand is a rounding error to you, that's great. Most businesses fall firmly in the place where that would be a problem.
I think there is a value add for large companies on AWS, but for smaller ones, I don't particularly feel like AWS is an F1 car, more like a self driving Tesla that locks you inside when it's on fire. And I find the cavalier attitude that these companies aren't important enough to add the distinction to be exhausting. AWS is being pushed on everyone.
The complexity of AWS is because a service like AWS is complex. Neither Azure or GCP has any less complexity. DigitalOcean offers way less services and as a result is way less complex.
>And I find the cavalier attitude that these companies aren't important enough to add the distinction to be exhausting
They aren't important in the same way a F1 car doesn't think families are important enough to add a back row seat. No company is going to have fidelity to serve a perfect product to every market. The frustration comes from the misplaced belief that a product should serve every kind of user in the market.
For instance, I don't see any pricing information when setting up an FSx filesystem, even for the size you setup. And there's definitely nothing saying backups will cost you more than storage (even though they are incremental?)
