Tell HN: I DDoSed myself using CloudFront and Lambda Edge and got a $4.5k bill

Post by salawat » Tue, Jun 28, 2022, 4:16 PM UTC

Keyframe wrote: post #75

sirwitti wrote: post #74

I'm very much on the boring technology side of things with respect to hosting. 40€ / month gets you a very powerful dedicated server that can easily handle millions of requests per day and performs incredibly well and can be managed easily. If you also use containers you even get quite a bit of flexibility and agility. To be honest I don't really understand the sentiment that developers can get away with not knowing…

Yeah, but how will you scale up your multi-dozen-users-at-the-same-time app easily then?

Post by heretogetout » Tue, Jun 28, 2022, 4:20 PM UTC

bombcar wrote: post #76

heretogetout wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Many people would enable it, forget about it, and footgun themselves on the other side. Yeah, but I figure as long as Amazon doesn't immediately remove stored data, the damage of the footgun would be minimal. Speaking for myself, of course, I'd rather have a short outage than an unexpected thousand dollar overnight expense. It seems so trivial that it's unclear why AWS would not implement this feature. The only exp…

Because the downside for a company isn't "oh it was off overnight" it's "we finally hit it big and made zero sales because AWS shut us off". Given how easily they reverse the bills, I suspect that they have a policy of doing it (perhaps a few times per account, something to prevent abuse) because they really don't want to trigger the above scenario.

Post by shepardrtc » Tue, Jun 28, 2022, 4:22 PM UTC

sirwitti wrote: post #74

I'm very much on the boring technology side of things with respect to hosting. 40€ / month gets you a very powerful dedicated server that can easily handle millions of requests per day and performs incredibly well and can be managed easily. If you also use containers you even get quite a bit of flexibility and agility. To be honest I don't really understand the sentiment that developers can get away with not knowing…

Post by rozenmd » Tue, Jun 28, 2022, 4:23 PM UTC

logifail wrote: post #73

rozenmd wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I run 1.2 million uptime checks per week, my total AWS bill was $150/mo before I migrated to permanently running VMs - it's definitely doable without trying too hard.

> my total AWS bill was $150/mo before I migrated to permanently running VMs I know I keep harping on about this, but [if you have a vague idea what you're doing] you can squeeze an awful lot out of a cheap VM. I'm currently working on a project that we're deliberately prototyping using ultra-cheap VMs. If it takes off we know how to scale it up, if it doesn't the costs stay very very low.

Post by huksley » Tue, Jun 28, 2022, 4:23 PM UTC

f0e4c2f7 wrote: post #32

If you contact support via your Amazon account and explain your error they will often remove some (but usually not all) of the bill. Sorry that happened, always one of the scarier parts of using AWS. This sounds like an especially tricky one with the standard billing alerts not even catching it.