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Avoid Surprise Bills from AWS

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71–76 of 76 posts

Re: Avoid Surprise Bills from AWS

#71
post #5

How much does a domain name like "begin.com" cost, and how do you get a good domain / brand name for your startup (without calling it "PurpleKerfuffle" or something unregistered)? Is there a market for this? A strategy? I'm trying to get something good, but I keep getting back figures in the millions of dollars. Even ".io" domains are $100k. It's ridiculous. Am I doing something wrong?

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…

Running my own development service, I usually manage to find unique names for people all the time. If they really need a specific name, it's not always expensive to buy it from certain (legit only) places...

We don't use AWS for most of our solutions, we still use traditional (fixed price) hosting. AWS changed hosting into a utility-based service that can balloon way too fast, and they make TONS of money off of unsuspecting clients, especially government clients. It's wild to see their bills at times for even simple web sites that don't get tons of traffic. On-Prem services are better sometimes, but no-one wants to hear that.

Re: Avoid Surprise Bills from AWS

#72
post #5

How much does a domain name like "begin.com" cost, and how do you get a good domain / brand name for your startup (without calling it "PurpleKerfuffle" or something unregistered)? Is there a market for this? A strategy? I'm trying to get something good, but I keep getting back figures in the millions of dollars. Even ".io" domains are $100k. It's ridiculous. Am I doing something wrong?

Either you are the squatter, you pay the squatter, or you dodge the squatter. It is what it is.

Exactly all the same principles as the real estate market now basically.

Re: Avoid Surprise Bills from AWS

#73
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

And you'd be competing for the price-sensitive (ie worst) customers

Exactly.

Re: Avoid Surprise Bills from AWS

#74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 actio…

Is step 3 literally "create an upfront action for the single EC2 service I have configured"? If so yes then the problem is scaling, 1 thing by 1 person created in 1 day in AWS is pretty easy to manage even without this feature but 1,000 things across many service buckets where 1 is something like a runaway suspended machine in a region you can't find when it should have been terminated and you don't know what needs t…

A solution for the hobbyist who can't foot a 15k bill was asked, and given.

Re: Avoid Surprise Bills from AWS

#75
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…

Or maybe you want that crowd to go to someone else's infrastructure. And therefore you don't build it, and no one else builds it.

Re: Avoid Surprise Bills from AWS

#76

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).

It's the difference between a limit order, and writing a script that monitors the price of a stonk and submits a market order.

Well, limit orders aren't guaranteed to trade on the spot either. Any reputable brokerage will warn you of this when you create one.

There will always be lag, but I've never tested how quickly AWS monitors trigger under extreme load.

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