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My First AWS “Free Tier” Hosting Bill Was $990

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Re: My First AWS “Free Tier” Hosting Bill Was $990

#3
TL;DR: Misleading title. Amazon service came through.

* Author clicked through Amazon UI/UX, and ended up with a huge bill.

* The UI/UX was confusing and poorly designed -- at no point was he shown he'd pay anything, let alone a lot.

* He was refunded the money AND given credits to make up for the hassle.

This is one of my key frustrations with Amazon. (1) I'd like services like RDS or similar on a pay-as-you-go fashion, rather than based on spun-up servers. I'd like SQL-as-a-service where I pay for actual storage and operations (without dedicated machines). (2) I'd like to understand pricing up-front, and be able to track what I'm paying.

Still, beats everything else.

Re: My First AWS “Free Tier” Hosting Bill Was $990

#4
post #2

This is why they make so much money. Flat rate hosting is the only way I’ll go. They bank on smaller bills and hope not everyone calls.

FTA:

> To Amazon's credit, they removed the bills from my account and gave me free hosting credits to make up for it. Their support was swift and professional.

Re: My First AWS “Free Tier” Hosting Bill Was $990

#5
post #4
post #2

This is why they make so much money. Flat rate hosting is the only way I’ll go. They bank on smaller bills and hope not everyone calls.

FTA: > To Amazon's credit, they removed the bills from my account and gave me free hosting credits to make up for it. Their support was swift and professional.

Perhaps it sounds a bit odd, but in most business settings, I'd rather be paying double and have service like this than be paying half without that customer service.

Generous policies like these avoid headaches, and headaches are much more expensive than machines.

Re: My First AWS “Free Tier” Hosting Bill Was $990

#6
My girlfriend's first "Free Tier" hosting build was $5200 for ingesting a single document on Kendra. After nearly a month of working with the service team she was able to get the bill removed (even the service team did not know how to delete the app). Its insane that an overage charge on a "Free tier" service can be the price of a used car or multiple months of rent.

Re: My First AWS “Free Tier” Hosting Bill Was $990

#7
post #4
post #2

This is why they make so much money. Flat rate hosting is the only way I’ll go. They bank on smaller bills and hope not everyone calls.

FTA: > To Amazon's credit, they removed the bills from my account and gave me free hosting credits to make up for it. Their support was swift and professional.

Thanks, I did read the article. I clarified my post with an additional point.

Re: My First AWS “Free Tier” Hosting Bill Was $990

#8
Since the very beginning AWS has been an adversary to their own customers.

Either you invested your time/money in deeply knowing their ins and outs ( And you're fine spending your life that way ) or you're just a cog inside someones else's big wallet and don't care.

If you're not a big corp or don't have VC money to burn, there are much better options than AWS. The feeling of not getting f"#$ed over every step of the way is priceless, Azure is barely any better.

Re: My First AWS “Free Tier” Hosting Bill Was $990

#9
post #4
post #2

This is why they make so much money. Flat rate hosting is the only way I’ll go. They bank on smaller bills and hope not everyone calls.

FTA: > To Amazon's credit, they removed the bills from my account and gave me free hosting credits to make up for it. Their support was swift and professional.

That's not unlike a lot of other companies --- if you complain they'll be nice to you, but otherwise they'll eat all they get.

Re: My First AWS “Free Tier” Hosting Bill Was $990

#10
post #3

TL;DR: Misleading title. Amazon service came through. * Author clicked through Amazon UI/UX, and ended up with a huge bill. * The UI/UX was confusing and poorly designed -- at no point was he shown he'd pay anything, let alone a lot. * He was refunded the money AND given credits to make up for the hassle. This is one of my key frustrations with Amazon. (1) I'd like services like RDS or similar on a pay-as-you-go fash…

>(1) I'd like services like RDS or similar on a pay-as-you-go fashion, rather than based on spun-up servers. I'd like SQL-as-a-service where I pay for actual storage and operations (without dedicated machines).

Seems a somewhat hard problem due to latency constraints and advantages of memory caches. For big data you have AWS Athena and Google Big Query. There's also auto-scaling if you're large enough of either read replicas (AWS Aurora) or the whole thing (Google Spanner).

>and be able to track what I'm paying.

Amazon does provide a nice billing dashboard which updates what you're going to pay throughout the month. Telling you ahead of time what the price will be per month of something would be nice.

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