Just run Linux computers on ionos with unlimited traffic and get on with the job instead of worrying about silly things like how much traffic passed over some internal software system and will it bankrupt the company. https://www.ionos.com/servers/vps
Same but on Hetzner. Incredibly beefy machines. Unlimited traffic. No fear of any sudden changes that I explicitly didn't act upon. I do not know why people fall for the shiny marketing so easily, that too hackers? Is it all the Javascript folks? Vercel I know is propped up by them for sure.
> may only come within tens of dollars of accurately predicting your water bill Uh, what is the magnitude of these water bills? I’m fairly certain I can predict it to within a few dollars because it’s only $35 in the first place.
> " You probably can’t tell me how much electricity your home is using right now, and may only come within tens of dollars of accurately predicting your water bill. But neither of those bills are all that scary, because you assume there’s a limit to how much you could run them up in a single billing interval. " I had a $600 surprise water bill. It was (partially) forgiven because the water department could drive to m…
Water billing is indeed nonlinear with no cap. I had a surprise $3000 excess water bill due to a broken connection at the meter. Followed by a $3000 excess sewer bill (!) because the assumption is if I used $3000 of water, it must have gone down the drain. However, if you demonstrate to an inspector that the water must have leaked below ground (as in this case) there’s a process for getting the second charge waived. Unfortunately the leak was on our side of the meter, so the first charge was correct, though we got partial forgiveness.
There is a very obvious fix for surprise billing. Enforce a billing cap and terminate service if it's met. Even better if you send alerts when the cap is approaching. If I pay $39/month, a default cap should be $39 per-month. Otherwise, let me set a cap I am comfortable with. Surprise billing is never good for customers, only the business.
I promise, you are not the first person to have thought of this, and, believe it or not, there are reasons other than malice and avarice that cloud providers don't terminate service based on billing caps. Terminating service is a big deal. We agree completely about surprise billing.
Anyone else remember we had widely available and completely understandable options to rent everything from baseline web-hosting all the way up to private rack services for actual years before AWS came along and apparently all of that was forgotten, Warhammer 40K style? I've rented a VPS from a vendor for going on 20 years now (Holy fuck I'm old) and I've never once been surprised at the bill.
You know that book "JavaScript: The Good Parts"? There needs to be a similar one "AWS: just the good parts". It would probably talk about EC2 (VPS), S3 (cheap bulk storage), SES (emails), and that's about it. When folks get into the elastic-super-beanstalk-container-swarm-v0.3 products, that's when they really kill themselves on the bills. That said, yes, just using a VPS vendor is the easy way to stick to the good p…
I’ll argue that while wonky sometimes, ECS is pretty decent. Especially once you use fargate.
> may only come within tens of dollars of accurately predicting your water bill Uh, what is the magnitude of these water bills? I’m fairly certain I can predict it to within a few dollars because it’s only $35 in the first place.
I have absolutely no idea how much I pay for water, but vaguely think it’s probably between 0 and 100. Why does knowing it’s small mean you can predict it precisely, in a world where auto-payment exists so you never have to actually look at your bills?
There's plenty of situations you don't hear about. A few years ago I f'ed up and accidentally pushed keys to a public repo, and by the next morning, we racked up $50k in AWS charges from crypto miners. We reached out, they gave us a security checklist that if we followed, they'd take off the charges. We did, and by Monday (my code push was Friday evening) the charges were taken off. No public shaming required.
You likely already know that, but to anyone else interested: a good way to prevent these kinds of situations is to run 'nosey parker' on your git repo before pushing it to a remote. It will dig through your code and configs, looking at files and through all the git history, and highlight anything that looks like tokens, passwords, keys, etc. You can set it as a pre-commit hook to block the offending code from even be…
Github has a similar feature that’s free for public repositories IIRC.
Y'all really, really want caps. We think that's a crazy feature. We don't want to do it. But I just had this conversation on a Slack with a bunch of friends at other companies and they were just as yell-y about this. There's a threshold of feedback at which I think you could get us to do some kind of cap thingo. I'm just saying. Yeesh.
Another reason to be cloud agnostic. They are counting that switching cost will make you eat the bill. If you have to be cloud, do dev in one cloud and test/prod in another. I know, I know, easier said than done.
An argument that is often only made by folks who didn't ran anything at scale on a public cloud. If you've ever set in a room when a cloud deal was signed, you'd know it cable: you don't get to pay less by threatening to switch providers (I've seen people try to suggest that and get laughed out of the room), but by buying more from a single one. Hence accident forgiveness is in the same marketing bucket as free credi…
AWS is something like an insurance service. We all pay more so that they can forgive the people that mess up xD
In your article or in the posts here you have not said why you think its a crazy idea.
I've said it over and over again: if you have a serious app, and someone somehow steals a credential from you and uses it to light up a bunch of crypto miners, you don't want us shutting down your main app in response. We perceive it mostly as a feature that will blow people up. We agree about the underlying problem! You don't want to spend $5000 in a month for services you never wanted. We don't want you spending th…
Giving people the ability to use caps as an optional feature doesn’t force anyone to use it.
Also, you could turn things off in the inverse order they were turned on until the cap is satisfied. So all the crypto miner instances would be turned off before database backups being deleted.