I ended up self hosting my own stuff behind cloudflare
Netlify just sent me a $104k bill for a simple static site
161–170 of 836 posts
Re: Netlify just sent me a $104k bill for a simple static site
#162And that’s how you lose loyal customers who have evangelised your products for years. I’ve helped local mom-and-pop stores, bootstrapped startups etc setup on Netlify and now I fear that Netlify might send them a hefty bill.
I’ll remove all my websites from Netlify and moving to Cloudflare. Auf Wiedersehen.
Re: Netlify just sent me a $104k bill for a simple static site
#163Netlify doesn't offer alerts or budget-triggers? This is my nightmare every time I put up my card details with a cloud service provider.
The funny thing is - such platforms "scale" easily with the underlying assumption that scale equals profits, enough to justify increased cost. Needless to say, inaccurate assumption.
Re: Netlify just sent me a $104k bill for a simple static site
#164The 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-...
To some extent, that answer is fair enough, assuming they make this clear up front. If their service is "we'll keep your site up no matter what, for a price" that's a fine service to offer. It's not what the vast majority of people want, of course.
If their advertising is targeted to small businesses and individuals who could never afford this type of service, they could be guilty of false advertising, at least morally guilty. I haven't seen their marketing so I wouldn't want to say.
Re: Netlify just sent me a $104k bill for a simple static site
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's spend limit? Autoscaling is a feature!
I guess we need regulation for this.
Why do we need regulation? "Keep the service up no matter what happens, no matter the cost" is a useful business model for companies that make the mistake of promising too many nines to their customers.
The issue at hand is that people put small websites on hosting providers designed for megacorporation wealth, like Netlify. I highly doubt the average blog needs more than a $10 VPS located in one single country without automatic fallback to another data centre. You can probably even go with a $5 VPS if you don't care about the first wave of HN front page bots not being able to reach your site.
Re: Netlify just sent me a $104k bill for a simple static site
#166I hate that a lot of times the only solution is
to post on HN/reddit/Twitter etc publicly. Just imagine all the other people who don’t use social
media and ended up paying…
Re: Netlify just sent me a $104k bill for a simple static site
#167Wow, insane. I would not have guessed that they simply charge you for additional bandwidth instead of just shutting your site down for the rest of the month.
This is not something you would assume from the pricing page. On the pricing page, they show you:
Add-ons:
Additional bandwidth
Additional build minutes
Additional teams
No currently enabled site add-ons with fees
I have seven static sites on there, deleted 3 of them right now, will migrate the other 4 soon. Unbelievable bullshit.
Re: Netlify just sent me a $104k bill for a simple static site
#168This 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
I'm moving everything to Cloudflare.
Re: Netlify just sent me a $104k bill for a simple static site
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
Electricity costs money
But no electricity is used if your instance is up but idle.
What does "idle" mean? Both a Linux or Windows OS not running any active software will still do computation and even network traffic (disk cache wrangling, indexing, checking for updates, NTP clock syncing etc), and requires electricity to do so.
It's very low cost, especially if its on a VM from a host that otherwise runs other VMs, but it's not 0. And if it happens to be the last VM preventing a hardware server from completely powering off, then it's actually quite far from 0.
Re: Netlify just sent me a $104k bill for a simple static site
#170Defaulting to unbounded liability as the standard operating procedure for cloud infrastructure should be illegal.
And it is, I remember cases where telcos were prevented from charging thousands for roaming expenses because they were not licensed to make large loans.
Oh God roaming is one my biggest nightmares and it’s the worst UX to not get charged, too. ‘You want to go on vacation? Make sure to hunt down an option hidden 3 levels deep and enabled by default because we really like money and you didn’t read the fine print? Too bad, we really like money’