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Hello people.

So I got this AWS sitting around I had used it before just for some scrapebox runs so there is still around 15k credits left (not billed for this month yet but shouldn't be more then 30$ more).

http://shrani.si/f/1r/MI/1nLq02kl/awsactivate.jpg

As you can see account is valid till 2018 so plenty of time to use those credits up.

I will be accepting BTC only and we can do escrow if you do not trust me.

http://shrani.si/f/2u/OS/4sQp6NfV/regions.jpg

UPDATE:

CHECK LAST POST.

This is a significant amount of credit.  Since it is not transferrable to a different account, how could you guarantee that this account would not be suspended?  What would stop you from claiming your account had been hacked or anything like that?

Would you consider authorising the buyers account to "use" this billing account instead?  If so would you consider taking payment in parts, for example in advance for every $1000 of credit used?  That way there is less risk for buyers, and equally you can stop it at any time (by disabling the buyers account) if they don't pay.

Going rate for AWS is around $6-10 per $100 of credit, less if buying in bulk.  I would expect a $15k account to fetch somewhere around $1000-$1200.

I think I could change the email and password after the payment so that shouldn't be a problem. I have an expired card on there but account is still active (has been for the past year or so) so I doubt that will really be the problem. It might get suspended if you will go against their TOS so I can't really guarantee that if you will let's say use miners for BTC on there as that will totally get it suspended.

Why would I do that? I have no use of the account and no means of scamming like I said this will go to someone that knows what he is doing and know the TOS of AWS as I don't want to see it go to waste even though I am not using it much anymore.

If possible I would like to sell it in one go but if that is something that would make it assured then yes can be done.

As for the price I was expecting to get somewhere between 1.5k (but can negotiate if you got a good reason to use this).

If you got more questions I will gladly answer them.

The list where the credit can be used:

That's not the right way to do it. You sell your AWS account together with the e-mail account it's tied to. So if the current e-mail is your private then change it now (https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/knowledge-center/change-email-address/). If you wait till you find the buyer then there will be two (in fact three) very significant changes in the AWS account happening in a very short time: the e-mail changes and the IP address changes.

It's already bad enough that all of a sudden there will be logins coming from a totally different IP address that's physically impossible to be yours (yours - the original and officially the only owner). If you change the login e-mail only shortly before that it will be another indication that the account was most probably illegally sold (and thus shall be suspended). The IP address issue can be partially counteracted by using roles, though, see the link below. Then there is a third (unavoidable) important change that happens when the user changes: the workload changes, i.e. the way how the new owner uses the account.

Each and every such crucial change increases the chance of triggering some safety measure, all resulting in the account suspension. So don't wait and change the e-mail now.

I strongly encourage every potential buyer to read some of the best practices regarding buying AWS accounts (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1608165).

Thanks for your input. We have decided to go with the giving access to other account which I doubt will be any problem. I mean why shouldn't we be able to share the account and budget with other "companies" well accounts to be exact?

He has experience with amazon AWS and probably account will be used by him but will let you know in the thread if he won't be interested anymore.

That's called consolidated billing (http://docs.aws.amazon.com/awsaccountbilling/latest/aboutv2/consolidated-billing.html) and the problem with this in this situation could be the following:

You can use the Consolidated Billing feature to consolidate payment for multiple Amazon Web Services (AWS) accounts or multiple Amazon International Services Pvt. Ltd (AISPL) accounts within your organization by designating one of them to be the payer account.

The buyer obviously does not belong to your organization, whatever that may mean, so I would be careful with this. If you pay from your account the bills of some totally unrelated foreign account who-knows-whose and who-knows-from-where it may possibly trigger some money-laundering and/or tax-evasion counter-measures, again resulting in the account suspension. The easiest would be to just sell it as it is, but change the administrative e-mail right now so that the time before the IP is changed is as long as possible.

Actually, thinking about this more, under certain conditions probably the safest for you (the seller) and also for the buyer would be if you simply allowed the buyer to access your account using roles (that way he will never login directly to your account so there will be no different IP login issue) and let him pay you daily based on how much credit he spends (which you can see in the daily billing). You would basically rent the account.

Not every buyer will probably agree to that, and it would require the buyer to use your account in an absolutely legal/legit/proper way so that your account is not suspended based on his actions. This is a risk you would have to take as you would be dealing with anonymous unknown people. But I guess whatever way you decide to sell your account there will always be a certain risk.

If you happen to like the renting idea, I would be interested myself. I am using AWS accounts for work, so nothing improper, and I could pay you the mentioned 6-10% daily. Depending on how many instances I could launch I would be able to burn through all your credit in a few months, probably by the end of this year, daily rent paid in BTC.

Again thanks for your inputs here really appreciate it giving me some ideas what can be done with the account. I am up for renting I had thought about it before as well. I might be getting one more account soon with 15k credits if everything will go according to plan the next week when I go visit a friend.

The guy above that contacted me wants to do mining which I am not really up to it as I heard only trouble would come if you use the instances for mining though he claims he didn't get suspended before so yeah.

I am also doing some more research on what can and cannot be done.

Well, we would have to go through AWS's ToS but in general what's not acceptable is anything illegal, of course spamming, anything that may be related to terrorism and I personally would also stay away from anything related to hazard, gambling and financial services. Mining doesn't fall in any of those areas. If you try mining or any other computing-intense workload with any cheap VPS provider they will kick you out before you blink. But this is not the case with AWS. Here if you are not using all the resources in the fullest you are basically throwing money away. So I don't really see the issue with mining on AWS, in fact it was quite popular in the past. Nowadays it's difficult to be profitable anymore but I am really not aware of any troubles towards the Amazon's rules.

An important thing to keep in mind, though, is that whatever model use will the buyer/renter claim, it may or may not be the truth and there is no way for you to actually know or be able to check what they are really doing. Even if you have full access to your account you will not be able to access the instances they run if they use encryption etc. So the risk is still there.

What could limit your exposure and the risks is if you could block all the instances from accessing the Internet. You can do that easily in the firewall. Just by this simple action you will noticeably limit the harm that can potentially result from the instances. Of course not every renter will be ok with that. In my case I would, my instances only communicate within the AWS network.

AWS mining is fine but johnsmithx is more legit :)

My advice if you want to offer the second 15k account (I'm assuming you rent the first to jsx) is to simply create him an access point into the account, pretty much like you would hire him in your company. This way you stay in the AWS ToS and everyone benefits. However I would condition thou the sale to the bona fide of your client - hence my vouch for johnsmithx

Good luck everyone.

RFX

Forgot to mention that I also got the 15k from AWS Activate but I'm using that for my own purposes.

The only way to get $15k credit is to have your startup enrolled with a business accelerator or venture capital company, is that right?

that is correct ads2alpha

And the only way to get your startup enrolled is to actually have a registered LLC or NPO or whatever and meet with those guys in person? I just don't know how all that works.

That depends on what stage are you at and at the end of the day it's all about what you mutually agree on, but in general they would limit themselves greatly if they always insisted on meeting in person. The only thing that really matters is whether you have something of value to offer, an idea and the necessary knowledge and skills to turn the idea into at least a proof of concept, not where you happen to physically live. There are many ways how people can meet, communicate and cooperate without traveling half the world to see each other face to face. And whether you are registered as a business entity in your local country is the least thing that matters. You start wondering about the legal requirements and the whole business structure of your experiment after you figure out the actual content and the viability, which is what the incubator is supposed to help you with. If you have everything figured out already you wouldn't need to "incubate".


Yes, he could work for you as your employee or a sub-contractor etc. so it's perfectly understandable that you create an IAM user for him and allow him the access to your account. The same effect can also be achieved using roles, as I already mentioned, which has an added benefit of not having to login and logout all the time - he stays logged in his own account and only switches roles (see the screenshots in my topic). I don't have many AWS accounts but still I would probably go crazy if I had to log in and out every time I need to work in a different account. Another advantage is that when you switch a role you end up exactly where you were before. I am using this very effectively for example when checking the ongoing billings - with a mere single mouseclick I can see the expenses of each account.

Btw thanks for the vouch, RFX  ;)

Yeah it was me who would want to use it for mining (yes there are coins that would make this profitable, if you know where to look).
I've been using AWS quite heavily for mining on and off for about 3 years now.  On occasion I have been known to launch more than 2000 instances at a time... I have a good relationship with Amazon and because of this I have significantly increased limits over the standard...
https://i.imgur.com/uXbeF9A.png
(Yes you'll just have to trust I didn't doctor it)

This is why I am confident that AWS have no problem with people using their services for mining  
I operate a few pools for CPU-mineable coins and am an active developer on one of those projects as well - I won't say which publicly as it is this coin that I will likely be mining :)

Oh, you are doing CPU mining? I am using AWS only for GPU computing so we could even share the account :)

Is it really a big secret to reveal which CPU-mined coins yield the most? A while back I was actually trying to find a good use for all the CPU power in my instances because all those CPUs were basically idling and long story short in the end I settled with Lyra2RE at Nicehash. It doesn't give much, anywhere between $2 and $20 a day, but it's free money that can alleviate the expenses a bit and at least I am not wasting the CPUs. So if I knew that there are better ways how I could use all my idle CPU power I would be very grateful.

paulthetafy: Impressive. I'm not there yet :)

Confirm that Amazon has no problem with mining, as long as you cover your bills.

monsterim: being a developer myself I have a huge respect for open source software developers and since my workload is purely commercial, and after talking a bit to paulthetafy, I vouch for him getting your account(s). I am still interested in renting your account(s) and once you drain all the credit out I will also be interested in buying the accounts themselves off you, but I just think paulthetafy deserves it more.

Very kind!  Yes John and I have been talking about our uses of AWS in PM's.  I'm happy to talk about it with monsterim in detail too, I'm just trying to find a suitable time as we are in very different timezones!

I like where this is going :)

No worries John I might be getting one more account so yeah. I did talk with Paul and am interesting in renting the account to him I am sure he will use it properly without getting it suspended. There are tons of ways for the AWS to be in use for me lets say I could simply get the GPU instance and render 3D animations that I do have my PC working to do some IM things when it is doing that but that is minimal which is why I want to actually rent it. I will see in a weeks time if I can get another account (I am sure I can).

Well Paul I guess I will be online today in like 2 in the morning my time so we can talk it out.

I still got this available if anyone needs as I can't seem to get a hold of paul.

Would prefer to sell account in one go for 1k$ but can go with consolidated billing (account was verified and approved) so shouldn't have any trouble.

I do have my main account as well with about 14k credits which I will only accept with consolidated billing for a bit higher price.

I am interested in account . I sent you a pm maybe we deal somehow if you have a good escrow.

Thanks

If Paul will take it the first one maybe we can work on some details on consolidated on the other account. I am open to any sugestions.

me too looking how it will end
hope someone can use it for profit

We talked about this with Paul and the consolidated billing way doesn't seem to be the way to go after all, there are some privacy issues.

Selling the account in one go for $1k is still on the table, though. But for that you would first have to change the email as I described in my previous post (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1613011.msg16213000#msg16213000) because the AWS account must be sold together with the email it is attached to, and you would also need to show the EC2 limits in a believable way, i.e. not just some random screenshots which may be photoshopped and/or may come from a different account but either by giving a temporary access to the account or showing the limits via TeamViewer or something similar.

Furthermore, the buyer would need to know from what geographical area were you logging to the account because he will have to find a proxy with IP from that location so that his logging from a totally different part of the world won't trigger any alarm.

You also mentioned that the card in the account has already expired. Even though there is credit in the account it may happen, one way or another, that the account accrues a bill not covered by the credits. Even if the bill is $0.2 Amazon will want to charge that amount from the card. If the card is expired, the charge won't succeed and the account will get eventually suspended and terminated. To ensure that this doesn't happen, and since the buyer won't be able to obtain a card in your name (or the name the account is registered in), you will first have to put this situation in order, i.e. register a new card in the account with at least $5 prepaid amount.


Without each and every step above completed the account is not safe for the buyer and I strongly discourage anyone from buying any AWS account (not just this one) if such basic safety measures are not met. For more information see the detailed post with all the best practices and common mistakes regarding buying AWS accounts, link is in my signature.

I have now found a steady account renting guy so those 2 accounts are not available anymore. I however can get more in the future.

As for the card yeah it was expired but that won't trigger anything. I know you are a bit sceptical about this and so I was as well but so far the guy I am renting to is doing okay (and yes I do have VCC up with 5$) on all accounts as I know how AWS can easily try and charge 5 payments of 1$ for authorization only.