Ask HN: My VPS got hacked and now I'm facing a massive bill. What can I do?

Post by waxjar » Sun, Oct 19, 2014, 6:32 PM UTC

thewhk wrote: post #45

I work for a VPS provider in the US. These situations are common and we usually just issue a credit and give a reminder to the customer to please secure their server That brings me to my point. How did the hack occur? When you get a VPS you are fully responsible for what goes on in there. It is your responsibility to secure it and keep it updated. It's not the provider's fault you did not apply the latest security up…

Post by pmalynin » Sun, Oct 19, 2014, 7:05 PM UTC

UnoriginalGuy wrote: post #28

BukhariH wrote: post #11

I've been in the exact same situation with AWS ( http://cl.ly/SHOu ). It was a nerve recking couple of days but I contacted AWS support and they were extremely good. They helped me secure my machine and then cancelled the 1.4K payment they were going to take from my account. In all the whole process took 2.5 weeks and I only had to pay $15 for the I/O requests. The best thing I can recommend is to talk to your host a…

AWS also has billing alarms. If you're running an account which should cost $15/month then for the love of god set an alarms at e.g. $20/month. I had a reserved instance for 12 months, forgot to renew it, and on the 13th month (when it was on-demand) the usage creeped over my cap and I started getting alarms allowing me to kill the instance, renew my reserved, and restart it. Saved me at least $10. On a related topic…

Post by briandh » Sun, Oct 19, 2014, 7:31 PM UTC

lucb1e wrote: post #55

waxjar wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People that rent a $15/year VPS use it to run an IRC bouncer or a small web log, something you don't need to know a whole lot of sysadmin stuff for. They just need a machine that's always on. It's hardly worth hiring a sysadmin for (I find that suggestion laughable, to be frank). Managed hosting doesn't allow you to do much else besides hosting a website in PHP, which is not enough for plenty of use-cases, including…

> $15/year VPS Do tell, where do I get one of those? Cheapest I know of is $60 ($5 a month).

Post by Nyr » Sun, Oct 19, 2014, 7:36 PM UTC

JosephRedfern wrote: post #51

notok22 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hetzner has the first 20 TB free and then charges 2 euros per TB.

Beware: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6577465

Post by johnchristopher » Sun, Oct 19, 2014, 8:32 PM UTC

readme wrote: post #49

patio11 wrote: post #39

Incidentally, since many HNers probably come at this from a mental model of "Anything which appears on an invoice is non-negotiable and simply must be paid": a B2B service provider which collects payment after services are rendered is knowingly taking on credit risk and has already priced non-collectability of some accounts into their services. You may be overestimating how much drama is required for someone at their…

Also OP, if they don't write it off make sure to tell us all who it was so we can avoid them. The same thing happened to me with amazon. Amazon pid for it. It's highly unreasonable in my opinion to ask the customer of a VPS to pay for damages caused by a malicious attacker. It's tantamount to a landlord expecting you to pay after an arsonist comes along and burns down your apartment, just because you happened to be r…