Amazon = Awesome company.

[Slavik]

So last month I made quite a few purchases, and thinking it may continue, decided to use "amazon prime" to reduce shipping costs.

Anyway, this month I don't plan on making any purchases, but forgot to cancel my prime membership, anyway, logged in to do it thinking thats £50 down the drain. To open my email to find.

Since you have not used your Amazon Prime benefits, we are refunding your membership fee. Your refund should be processed within the next 2-3 business days and will appear as a credit on your next credit card billing statement. If your latest membership charge is still processing, we'll issue the refund as soon as the charge is completed.

How awesome is that? Like seriously... big thumbs up to amazon there, putting the customer first.

 

[Mouth]

Yup, terrific company with a great corporate responsibility policy. Not to mention their AWS products are terrific.

 

[Shelley]

So last month I made quite a few purchases, and thinking it may continue, decided to use "amazon prime" to reduce shipping costs.

Anyway, this month I don't plan on making any purchases, but forgot to cancel my prime membership, anyway, logged in to do it thinking thats £50 down the drain. To open my email to find.



How awesome is that? Like seriously... big thumbs up to amazon there, putting the customer first.

So they're nothing Like EA?

Good to hear though, sometimes but not often companies tend to pleasantly surprise you. I'm still waiting *glares at play.com*

 

[DRE]

I love Amazon. Wish I could figure that Cloudfront stuff out tho.

 

[robdog]

I love Amazon. Wish I could figure that Cloudfront stuff out tho.

What's there to figure out?

 

[DRE]

What's there to figure out?

Y'all host attachments and stuff there right? What are the benefits, how is it better than cloudflare etc.

 

[robdog]

Y'all host attachments and stuff there right? What are the benefits, how is it better than cloudflare etc.

I don't host any images there. I setup a "download/mirror" cloudfront. Which means that if someone tries to access http://static.domain.com/asset.gif and asset.gif doesn't exist in the cloudfront, Amazon will pull/download that from the source server. (which you define)

The BEST part is that they allow you to use the query string for cache busting now. (was a problem with avatars before)

Definitely well worth it, if you are looking for a CDN. Very very easy to setup.

 

[craigiri]

I am more than impressed with their customer service. It has to be the best in the world....or at least the best I have ever experienced.

I am also impressed with their CEO, who is building a company over DECADES instead of going for the quick profits. That is a rare breed...really! Especially today.

 

[DRE]

I don't host any images there. I setup a "download/mirror" cloudfront. Which means that if someone tries to access http://static.domain.com/asset.gif and asset.gif doesn't exist in the cloudfront, Amazon will pull/download that from the source server. (which you define)

The BEST part is that they allow you to use the query string for cache busting now. (was a problem with avatars before)

Definitely well worth it, if you are looking for a CDN. Very very easy to setup.

See that's the part that confuses me. You put the gif on your server in the static folder subdomain right, so when someone tries to view it, it creates a copy on amazon's cloudfront server? and then when they view the gif it is not from your own subdomain but from amazon's cloudfront server?

 

[Shyuan]

I subscribed to Amazon Prime last year to try out the service. It was very good, but I didn't buy many stuff from Amazon thus I decided to cancel. I was quite pleased and happy to see such a similar email.

Since you only used your Amazon Prime benefits on a few items, you will receive a prorated refund of £45.08 for the remaining months of your membership. Your refund should be processed within the next 2-3 business days and will appear as a credit on your next credit card billing statement. If your latest membership charge is still processing, we'll issue the refund as soon as the charge is completed.

I think this is the best ever refund policy I have ever seen WITHOUT having me to bug or remind them repetitively. I see Amazon's as automated. Really good.

 

[dutchbb]

Amazon is lobbying a lot with congress in order to make it harder for small business to compete with them... This is what you get with a government that gains too much power and large corporations taking advantage of that. Amazon is of course not alone in this, it's common practice now. Killing small business will eventually be bad for the consumer.

 

[craigiri]

Well, you could surely construe many things in many ways, but they have come out FOR paying sales tax (bill in congress now) in ALL states, which is a big positive for local businesses who previously had to compete with no tax online sales.
They also empower millions of people and small businesses to sell through their site - I have sold used gear, my son used to sell textbooks, etc.
All of the authors they empower are small businesses....

So, as usual, it depends.....nothing can stop progress, but as it goes they are not being sharks, but sharing some of the goods.

 

[Francesco V.]

Maybe great from a customer point of view, but not so great from an employee point of view. Too much stuff about bad working condition, and i'm not talking only about the Amazon Germany scandal where para-nazi security company play the Stalag game with amazon workers coming from other countries (portugal, spain, poland, etc).

 

[Forsaken]

Maybe great from a customer point of view, but not so great from an employee point of view. Too much stuff about bad working condition, and i'm not talking only about the Amazon Germany scandal where para-nazi security company play the Stalag game with amazon workers coming from other countries (portugal, spain, poland, etc).

That isn't always the company itself though, but is often the warehouse or contracted employees.

Amazon is a bit more on guard for issues such as that since the incident of people getting sick and passing out from a sweltering warehouse.

 

[Shelley]

Maybe great from a customer point of view, but not so great from an employee point of view. Too much stuff about bad working condition, and i'm not talking only about the Amazon Germany scandal where para-nazi security company play the Stalag game with amazon workers coming from other countries (portugal, spain, poland, etc).

I think every most company's are guilty of giving their employees terrible working conditions. Look at Apple, in china where they are fainting in 120c heat and fighting to get Ice-Lolly time to cool down, no air conditioning just the sun brought to earth for those poor *******s. I'd expect that list to be endless with the amount of companies guilty of that.

 

[TheBigK]

I firmly believe that Xenforo should adopt Amazon SES bundled with newsletter facility inbuilt in XF.

 

[MattW]

See that's the part that confuses me. You put the gif on your server in the static folder subdomain right, so when someone tries to view it, it creates a copy on amazon's cloudfront server? and then when they view the gif it is not from your own subdomain but from amazon's cloudfront server?

You don't even have to have a subdomain on your own site.

I set out CloudFront over the weekend, and it literally took me 10 minutes to get it all set up.

This is the header response from one of my avatars now

Rather than go OT in this thread, drop me a PC, and I'll talk you though exactly what I did and how I did it.

 

[Francesco V.]

I think every most company's are guilty of giving their employees terrible working conditions. Look at Apple, in china where they are fainting in 120c heat and fighting to get Ice-Lolly time to cool down, no air conditioning just the sun brought to earth for those poor *******s. I'd expect that list to be endless with the amount of companies guilty of that.

The fact that a lot of companies give terrible working conditions to their employees is not a justification. In this thread we were talking about one of them, Amazon, and about its alleged awesomeness.

 

[AlexT]

We are using Amazon AWS for several web-related services. One of them is Route53, which provides high-available DNS. A few months ago our site was targeted by a DNS amplification attack, similar in technique as the one that attacked Spamhaus not long ago. To cut a long story short:

- had we not been hosting with a high-available DNS like Route53, our DNS would most likely have gone down and with it our entire site infrastructure. Through Route53, we weren't even aware of the attack, hadn't there been...

- an enormous bill. We were charged like 150 bucks - per day - for DNS queries. That's a multiple of what we'd normally pay for Route53 in a month. Through the high bill we became aware of the issue (Amazon AWS has a nifty customizable alert service), and through the log files it became apparent that it was a coordinated attack.

So we contacted Amazon. Although it took them a few days to come back at us (while our bill was going up and up), ultimately they resolved the issue (no more attacks) and completely waived the accrued costs caused by the attack. So big thumbs up here!!!

 

[MattW]

Excellent. How many DNS queries a month does Route53 give? I'm using DNSMadeEasy for mine, and have been using them for the last 4 years.