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I got pwned by my cloud costs

troyhunt.com

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Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#101

Post by mawalu »

hdjjhhvvhga wrote: post #67

It is very good these things are getting publicized. More and more people realize these payment schemes for what they are: a scam. Every cloud provider that refuse to put a hard spending limit participates in this. It is important to remember that not all cloud providers participate in it. For example, in Hetzner Cloud, they explicitly provide the maximum amount you are going to pay for a given instance or service in…

Hetzner Cloud(!) only has 20TB/Month included in the monthly costs and states that you have to pay for any additional traffic. I never reached that on one of their cloud boxes so I don't know how it looks like but it definitely isn't all up front. But yes the dedicated machines come with no additional traffic charges whatsoever

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#103

Post by jsiepkes »

Hamuko wrote: post #97
fs111 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like a pretty expensive privilege. How is using cloudflare okay in this then? Cloudflare is also not Azure

> Sounds like a pretty expensive privilege. Well, it might also come with contacts in the billing department.

Apparantly you also get 13K a year in credits (mentioned in the article):

> I'm going to miss the $13,000 USD (yes) a year in free azure credits. Just remember this amount of money when you are reading content about "how good azure is" and "what the latest and greatest is" from influencers and community leaders here on social media...

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#104

Post by taubek »

It is good thing to know that this could happen to anyone. I guess that setting limits and alters should be one of the first things that one should do.

What would happen if a credit card limit was exceeded, a site would just stop working?

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#105

Post by hnbad »

closeparen wrote: post #71
lpcvoid wrote: post #56

Can somebody explain to me why I wouldn't just rent a 40 EUR dedicated server from Hetzner with unlimited traffic and gigabit uplink? His 600GB/day is way less than what you get over a gigabit link within a day. Sure, sudden bursts would perhaps "throttle" at a gigabit, but according to his article that was only the cloudflare proxy anyhow, so no pain in having that take a few seconds longer. As far as I am concerned…

Perhaps for the same reason that the vast majority of the readers of this site don’t use Hetzner: they are not European and neither are their users.

The reason Europeans tend to favor European service providers generally has to do with strong data protection guarantees and some level of protection against foreign surveillance. In practice a lot of European companies still use US services or at least services provided by US companies -- Troy Hunt is Australian and uses Azure from Microsoft, so this isn't just a thing Europeans do either.

I'd love to hear your reasoning why people who aren't European would prefer to avoid European service providers.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#106

Post by csours »

fs111 wrote: post #69
technion wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He is a Microsoft MVP. A title that is given for being a "community evangelist" of Microsoft. You wouldn't get that throwing it on a Heztner machine. Edit: Consider this article, and Geoff's statement about Azure credits. https://www.theregister.com/2021/04/21/microsoft_revokes_mvp...

Sounds like a pretty expensive privilege. How is using cloudflare okay in this then? Cloudflare is also not Azure

I don't think Azure offers a Cloudflare alternative, and I'm not sure they ever would - Cloudflare is too good and too cheap to compete against.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#107

Post by buro9 »

Don't put Cloudflare in front of a Cloud egress bill. i.e. don't do this: Azure|Amazon > Cloudflare

Always use your own proxy where the egress is well within your free tier, i.e. do this: Azure|Amazon > Hetzner|Linode > Cloudflare

Why?

Because Cloudflare cache is a massively multi-tenant LRU cache and whilst hot files will be cached well (and with Cloudflare Tiered Cache even better - but this itself is a cost) anything else is still going to expose you to some degree of egress cost.

When I exposed AWS to the web I paid $3k per month to AWS. With Cloudflare in front of AWS I paid $300 per month to AWS. With Linode in front of AWS and behind Cloudflare I paid $20 per month to Linode and about $12 per month to AWS.

A Linode, Hetzner instance... or any other dumb cheap web server that comes with a healthy free tier of bandwidth is all you need to set up a simple nginx reverse proxy and have it cache things to disk https://docs.nginx.com/nginx/admin-guide/content-cache/conte...

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#108

Post by Havoc »

These things really should have a AI like alert that is basically “cost is departing dramatically from historical pattern” without the need to set thresholds and the like

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#109

Post by maccard »

tlamponi wrote: post #81
tester756 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm fan of cheap VPSes too, but I'd like to have things like metrics out of the box

€40 gives you a dedicated server, not just a VPS. Getting metrics on that is not a hard problem, there are various projects that are relatively simple to set up. If you want to make it easier manage resources, metrics out of the box, and avoid (hoster) lock-in then I'd use a hyper visor distro like Proxmox VE (disclaimer, am a dev there) or the like, and you can migrate (or backup/restore) VMs or Containers easily to…

To make a fair comparison you need to consider the time cost for setting all of that other stuff up compared to having it out of the box. I'd an engineer on 100k takes a week to get it up and running then your vps cost 2k to set up and 40/month going forwards.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#110

Post by stavros »

dewey wrote: post #100
rcarmo wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are plenty of people using both, it's a good combination.

The point is about Cloudflare not being from Microsoft / Azure which is the company he's evangelising for.

But you can't use CloudFlare instead of Azure, so it's within scope for him.
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