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Avoid Surprise Bills from AWS

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Re: Avoid Surprise Bills from AWS

#51

Post by Havoc »

slimsag wrote: post #30
Havoc wrote: post #7

Somewhat surprised none of the major clouds off true sandboxed learning environments as a competitive advantage. i.e. We will not charge you more than $100 no matter what. Sure that doesn't work for enterprise stuff that has to be online, but there is a big market for people that can swallow $100 accidents but not 15k. And whoever offers that first will attract the cautious crowd. I've got friends that point blank re…

Isn't this DigitalOcean's whole business model, basically?

Yeah. There are lots of hard capped options...just not among the big clouds. Which is fair

I just don't get why the big 3 haven't tried to undercut their competition with this.

It's a very easy way to attract casual dabblers and enthusiasts to your platforms

Re: Avoid Surprise Bills from AWS

#52

Post by rustc »

Thaxll wrote: post #38
Dig1t wrote: post #34

Can someone just make “AWS insurance”? Honestly seems like a service that some people might pay for.. like pay $100/month to have some service monitor and guarantee that your services will be scaled back or turned off if you hit your quota.

Or just setup regular alerts / emails from AWS... https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/monitori...

You can still rack up a huge bill if you run a public web service and don't monitor the alerts 24x7.

Re: Avoid Surprise Bills from AWS

#53

Post by [deleted] »

laegooose wrote: post #14
eqmvii wrote: post #9

If only there were a way to stop the surprise billing once it starts. A friend created an AWS account with a new email address for a one-off side project, and wound up locked out of both the email account and the AWS account. But AWS has the credit card, so a 25 cent mystery charge appears every month. AWS support is completely useless despite years of attempts at escalation, and of course the credit card company can…

That's a lot of worries about 3$ per year.

[deleted]

Re: Avoid Surprise Bills from AWS

#54

Post by xadhominemx »

Havoc wrote: post #7

Somewhat surprised none of the major clouds off true sandboxed learning environments as a competitive advantage. i.e. We will not charge you more than $100 no matter what. Sure that doesn't work for enterprise stuff that has to be online, but there is a big market for people that can swallow $100 accidents but not 15k. And whoever offers that first will attract the cautious crowd. I've got friends that point blank re…

> We will not charge you more than $100 no matter what. Sure that doesn't work for enterprise stuff that has to be online, but there is a big market for people that can swallow $100 accidents but not 15k

I’m sure this market is actually tiny

Re: Avoid Surprise Bills from AWS

#55

Post by stephenhuey »

eqmvii wrote: post #9

If only there were a way to stop the surprise billing once it starts. A friend created an AWS account with a new email address for a one-off side project, and wound up locked out of both the email account and the AWS account. But AWS has the credit card, so a 25 cent mystery charge appears every month. AWS support is completely useless despite years of attempts at escalation, and of course the credit card company can…

Stripe provides virtual cards so I use a separate one for each online service and can delete a card at a moment’s notice.

Re: Avoid Surprise Bills from AWS

#57

Post by stopagephobia »

rustc wrote: post #48
stopagephobia wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of us People of Age remember when getting a good domain was easy before squatters :) And yes its hard now. In real life you can have the same business name in two different business areas as long as it doesn't cause confusion. I think we should get rid of domains all the way, I should be able to register any text and make it DNS resolve. Only answer for having squatters is to make any "domain" buyable so they ca…

> I think we should get rid of domains all the way, I should be able to register any text and make it DNS resolve. > Only answer for having squatters is to make any "domain" buyable so they can't get all the good ones. How's that any different from the current domain name system? There will still be only one owner of the text "google" or "begin".

Because then there is also g.oogle, go.ogle, goo.gle, goog.le, googl.e. Or my.google. Or whatever, more options.

Re: Avoid Surprise Bills from AWS

#58

Post by zamadatix »

SavantIdiot wrote: post #47

AWS offers alarms and actions that will stop or terminate your service based on budget thresholds to solve exactly this problem. Why aren't these sufficient? https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/monitori... It's literally the first thing I do when spinning up an instance in case I have a bug or go viral (never happened).

I don't have access to the dashboard because I cancelled my AWS account rather than try to spend more time finding things that still needed to be unconfigured/disabled to get them to stop billing me (the last straw was going to the spend analyzer and it telling me it'd take 24 hours to see what is still costing me money) but:

Can I terminate based on cost? Like "I have spent $1,000 this month in AWS, something has gone wrong just kill everything" (or at least runaway service buckets) or is it just "oh I forgot to terminate this particular EC2 instance once I was done with it it'd be nice if I could just set those rules up in advance"?

Re: Avoid Surprise Bills from AWS

#59

Post by SavantIdiot »

zamadatix wrote: post #58
SavantIdiot wrote: post #47

AWS offers alarms and actions that will stop or terminate your service based on budget thresholds to solve exactly this problem. Why aren't these sufficient? https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/monitori... It's literally the first thing I do when spinning up an instance in case I have a bug or go viral (never happened).

I don't have access to the dashboard because I cancelled my AWS account rather than try to spend more time finding things that still needed to be unconfigured/disabled to get them to stop billing me (the last straw was going to the spend analyzer and it telling me it'd take 24 hours to see what is still costing me money) but: Can I terminate based on cost? Like "I have spent $1,000 this month in AWS, something has go…

Yes.

Step 1. Go to billing and create a monthly budget. Mine is $100.

Step 2. Create an alert: First alert is I get an email when it exceeds 80% ($80) total AWS costs.

Step 3. Create an action: I only have a single EC2 instance running a webserver that is always on. If my threshold is exceeded (say, a million people start downloading my pictures and my IO-OUT spikes), my action stops my EC2 inst via an IAM role action. Boom. Server goes offline instantly, without having to log in (like if I'm sleeping, or drunk).

Done.

Sometimes I get an alert because my usual cost is $35/mo and if a few domain renewals pop up that month, it will spike to $80. Hence the alert at $80 and action at $100 threshold.

And I can use any kind of metric: IO bandwidth from downloads, RDS bandwidth for too many queries, if I had elastic instances, limit the # based on cost. It is completely flexible. You can terminate too, but I only have one, I don't use elastic pools to dynamically allocate.

I don't get all the fuss, it is quite a simple service. Maybe it doesn't scale well for huge operations and that is the problem cuz i'm not a power user or company?

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