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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

#121

Post by zekica »

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…

On Hetzner and with their €1.00 per TB after 20TB included, you can pay up to €324 per vps as you are limited to 1Gbps if you fully saturate the link all month.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#122

Post by dx034 »

fuzzy2 wrote: post #84
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…

That dedicated server you have to manage (ensure security, install the software you need, keep it updated and secure etc). It’s not for everyone. Also, as you can see in a screenshot on TFA: Some services are simply dirt cheap. The storage account and its various “sub-services” is such a thing. It’s hard to compete with dedicated hardware here. Depending on your dedicated hosting provider, the traffic cost trap exist…

Most cloud users will have a VM somewhere which you also have to manage.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#123

Post by dx034 »

tester756 wrote: post #66
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…

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

You can use Hetzner's cloud. You get metrics and still have a lot of free traffic with very low cost above that.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#125

Post by dx034 »

tpetry wrote: post #6
cyberCleve wrote: post #3

Ouch. If Troy Hunt of all people can make this mistake, it can happen to anybody. HIBP is an awesome service funded totally by donations, so it's too bad this happened. Of course Microsoft is happy to hide behind their confusing pricing model and let customers overpay for Azure without alerting them.

Every cloud makes this mistake easy! You have to manually activate billing alerts for everyone because they want you to spend more snd more each month. I am still waiting for a cloud without these dark patterns. But that will never happen because it‘s leaving a big amount of money on the table by not being hostile.

Hetzner's cloud offer is limited but they limit your possible spending by default and it's very easy to set up billing alerts. I guess they mostly do it to ensure they get the money at the end of the month, but it's equally useful for their users.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#126

Post by octoberfranklin »

omegalulw wrote: post #111
bennyp101 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it's not cool, and won't make your CV sparkle. I'm sure there becomes a point where cost of (hardware + maintenance + staffing) > (cloud + staffing), in which case sure crack on. But like you, I'll stick to a rented server for my stuff.

The direction is opposite IMO. As you grow bigger on prem starts making a lot more sense.

I think the case is for big companies that have a hard time attracting IT talent. Like, not in an even remotely IT-related industry, and their headquarters is in a city with no significant tech community. Places that scream "working here will not improve your resume".

I'm a major cloud skeptic, but there's a certain class of giant enterprisey companies that are never going to be able to attract good IT talent, and if they "just throw money" at the hiring problem they'll be innundated with slick imposters.

I think cloudy stuff lets those companies outsource a large chunk of something they'll never be good at. The cavalcade of Microsoft/Cisco certifications were an earlier decade's attempt at solving the same problem.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#127

Post by dx034 »

alfiedotwtf wrote: post #117
usr1106 wrote: post #23

That's the typical story. Something goes wrong and it costs you (typically a small company) a lot of money. At that time just nobody is looking at metrics. Even alarms don't help absolutely because they can also be missed. The only thing that would really help were a hard spending limit that stops all services except storage. If your site is important there will be such an amount of user feedback that it is impossibl…

> The only thing that would really help were a hard spending limit that stops all services except storage. Sadly, I haven't found a way to do that with AWS

It's funny that even Hetzner can do that and AWS can't. Shows that there's no interest from AWS to prevent these things from happening.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#128

Post by gwd »

stavros wrote: post #110
dewey wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And moreover, from what it sounds like, you can't use Azure without Cloudflare either (unless you have a lot of cash you want to burn). Microsoft will get a lot more business from someone advertising their "Azure with Cloudflare" setup than they will from someone advertising their "Azure without Cloudflare" setup.

(Edit: fix spelling)

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#129

Post by fleddr »

Cloud providers should really start protecting customers from these spikes. Alerts are not enough, there should also be hard caps (stop serving) and soft caps (serve at reduced speed/capacity) based on configured max budgets.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#130

Post by avrionov »

suction wrote: post #36

I wonder if before cloud computing, has there ever been a successful product / service where it was accepted with just a shrug that the volatility of monthly costs means it could bankrupt you with next month's bill, because of complexities and opaqueness of the cost structure make it virtually impossible to predict and protect against extreme peaks in all parts of the setup. Even if you run a relatively opaque cost s…

I worked on both cloud computing and on premise project. Before cloud computing the risks were different: - much harder to scale. It was much more common to over provision and have machines and bandwidth being unused for years.

- when we were hit with very high traffic due to a bug or something else, most of the time it would lead to customer outages. Based on the contract some times it requires to pay back because SLAs were not reached. Also an outage could lead to customers canceling the subscription.

We swapped one type of problems with another.

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