Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Netlify just sent me a $104k bill for a simple static site

old.reddit.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 836 posts

Re: Netlify just sent me a $104k bill for a simple static site

#151

Post by echelon »

jzebedee wrote: post #13

The most bizarre thing is that this is a known issue that folks have asked them for ways to mitigate, to no avail. The reddit thread even links to an extremely weird dialogue where Netlify's response boils down to, "if you're hosting a small site that gets DDoS'd, don't." https://answers.netlify.com/t/limit-bandwidth-to-avoid-high-...

This rings so true!

I've dealt with Netlify's support [1], and one of their CS heads was incredibly rude to me and blamed me for the problem they created.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35610956

Re: Netlify just sent me a $104k bill for a simple static site

#152

Post by Voultapher »

dhaavi wrote: post #7

> And since my amount is too large, they offer to discount to 5%, which means I still need to pay 5 thousand dollars. If they just reduce to 5% like that, it shows how disconnected this is from their real bandwidth cost. Really does feel like a scam.

They overcharge egress by about 500x https://getdeploying.com/reference/data-egress.

So even a reduction to 0.2% would habe been possible. Honestly don't understand why anyone feels comfortable overpaying so much. Especially when there is no configurable spending limit.

Re: Netlify just sent me a $104k bill for a simple static site

#153

Post by cotillion »

baq wrote: post #108
ji_zai wrote: post #74

This is my worst nightmare as a bootstrapped founder. And that there's no way to put a limit on spend is ridiculous. Someone that doesn't want me to do well can simply ddos me into bankruptcy out of nowhere. Just went through Vercel's docs: --- "Vercel helps to mitigate against L3 and L4 DDoS attacks at the platform level. Usage will be incurred for requests that are successfully served prior to us automatically miti…

Host on a provider which bills per hour. This caps your cost. It also makes your users pissed because you will go down, but if you’re small, you can afford that. If you’re big, you already have scaling options and should have a team to handle ddos.

My experience is that customers don't really care that much about small amounts of downtime no matter what size you are, people mostly get that unexpected stuff happens as long as you don't get hacked or misplace their data. Customers might complain a bit but seldom leave because of a few hours downtime.

This seems to mostly hold true to developers also, GitHub manages to survive just fine after all.

Re: Netlify just sent me a $104k bill for a simple static site

#154

Post by rozenmd »

ji_zai wrote: post #74

This is my worst nightmare as a bootstrapped founder. And that there's no way to put a limit on spend is ridiculous. Someone that doesn't want me to do well can simply ddos me into bankruptcy out of nowhere. Just went through Vercel's docs: --- "Vercel helps to mitigate against L3 and L4 DDoS attacks at the platform level. Usage will be incurred for requests that are successfully served prior to us automatically miti…

This might be a good time to point out Cloudflare Pages: https://pages.cloudflare.com/

Under the free tier:

> Unlimited bandwidth

Re: Netlify just sent me a $104k bill for a simple static site

#155

Post by apsurd »

boredtofears wrote: post #126
apsurd wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://render.com/ is free for static sites with custom domain support and SSL included. been happy so far! used to use s3 for the longest time, but aside from costing a nominal fee, it's so unnecessarily complicated in this day and age.

> used to use s3 for the longest time, but aside from costing a nominal fee, it's so unnecessarily complicated in this day and age its like 10 minutes of setup tops to host on s3

Not for me. It's always configuration voodoo. i've done it dozens of times and i used to think it's normal developer workflow. now i realize I was putting thumbtacks in my eyes for no good reason.

Creating an s3 bucket is easy enough. but you need to add the policy Json config to allow public access, and it has various versions across time and space. the one that works for me is like 15 years old iono. object resource "//*" something or other.

ok so now you have an s3-east-mybucket.com/index.html, ok custom domain that's route 53 yet more configuration vooodoo to point an s3 website enabled bucket blah blah.

wait! need SSL? oops actually that's cloudfront. need a cloudfront config voodo to point to an s3 config voodoo to your hopefully correctly configured route 53.

are you kidding me, 10 mins? You're a wizard. Now i do git push origin main and my sites up on render.com

Re: Netlify just sent me a $104k bill for a simple static site

#156

Post by baq »

throwawaaarrgh wrote: post #124
carlmr wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess we need regulation for this.

Or, rather than creating more regulations, people could read the contracts they agree to when they get service, and use a competitor if they don't like it

Yeah exactly why we need regulation - so contracts aren’t 100 pages long. DRY.

Re: Netlify just sent me a $104k bill for a simple static site

#157

Post by tomcam »

jamesdepp wrote: post #90

I recently rewrote a website/small backend API for a non-profit organization. I could've gone with a serverless architecture for our forms handling API and reduced spending to nearly the free tier, but I had no good way to protect against a scenario like this. There was just not good enough documentation about how to completely cut off spending in the scenario of an attack, and I wasn't comfortable leaving the organi…

I am confused. Why couldn’t GitHub Pages suffer a DDOS attack? Also they don’t want you using them for business purposes:

https://docs.github.com/en/pages/getting-started-with-github...

Re: Netlify just sent me a $104k bill for a simple static site

#159

Post by rsolva »

Hosting personal sites on cheap hardware at home makes even more sense to me after reading this horror story.

Why do not more technically inclined people self-host? Is it force of habit from how things are done at work?

I would much rather run the "risk" of some occasional dowtime, than keeping the lights on at all costs under a DDoS-attack.

Post reply on HN