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

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

#181

Post by yellow_lead »

AtNightWeCode wrote: post #172
toomuchtodo wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cloudflare. You will get a call if on a free or pro ($25/month) plan [1] if your bandwidth usage is so high it would warrant increasing your plan. Worst case, they turn you off. Preferred over denial of money attack based on your use case. Set and forget after pointing at your origin (time is money). You'll get a call on any of their plans if your bandwidth usage exceeds certain thresholds, I am assuming your median…

You typically can't replace Netlify with Cloudflare. You need something like Github actions with some storage, S3 or something and then one can put Cloudflare in front of it all for caching, DDOS protection and so on.

I believe you can replace most cases (static sites) with Cloudflare Workers [1].

[1] https://workers.cloudflare.com/

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

#182

Post by Culonavirus »

mythz wrote: post #46

More reasons why I avoid clouds with outrageous bandwidth fees, and prefer Hetzner's low cost fixed pricing with Cloudflare R2's 0 egress fees. Even if the DDoS wasn't caught by Cloudflare, the total cost for 192TB bandwidth on Hetzner would be €172. Although even after 10 years on Hetzner I've never paid for any bandwidth, always well within their generous 20TB free bandwidth.

I really hate Clouflare and at the same time love them. Love them for their free, generous 500k req./day pages and workers, hate them for not having spending limits (or at least I can't find them). I get that they probably don't care about individuals and small businesses paying them peanuts, and corps can afford to pay extra if something blows up, but for me it just means I will only use a free account, and they get none of my money.

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

#183

Post by tsimionescu »

littlestymaar wrote: post #133
johngladtj wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Electricity costs money

The electricity overhead of keeping an idle VM on an already running host is nearly zero though.

Sure, but the electricity overhead of keeping one host running just to run an idle VM is not as trivial.

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

#185

Post by jeroenhd »

JW_00000 wrote: post #144
iforgotpassword wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah Like wtf is wrong with that? Are people just to lazy to check what the conditions are when exceeding traffic? I'd never ever sign up for anything that just keeps charging...!?

But then where would you run a small hobby project that you'd like to run in the cloud? I have some small stuff I'm running on Google Cloud Platform, and honestly I'm scared of the same thing happening to me because there's no easy way to set a limit. But AWS and Azure have the same policy. (In my case, I'm looking for somewhere I can easily deploy a set of ~5 Docker containers, they don't need to scale up, and it's…

The big, professional, business cloud providers aren't designed for small hobby projects with expenditure limits.

You should look into going old school and just renting a VPS with any VPS provider that's not AWS/GCP/Azure. I know the big three are super popular, as are all of these "serverless" cloud companies, but very few of them offer the most important service for a small project: shutting down before you owe them a fortune.

Depending on the guarantees you want, Oracle has a free tier with no time limit. It provides 4 ARM cores with something crazy like up to 6GB of RAM for free. You may have a few days if downtime during maintenance, but once you've allocated the resources, you'll eventually get your services back from what I can tell. Best part is, if you only use their free tier, you need to manually upgrade your account to even be able to buy anything extra. Just make sure you have backups in case Oracle pulls an Oracle.

Or you could get a VPS from a budget hoster like Contabo, which isn't free but will fit most hobby projects I know just fine. They may shut you down if they're suffering from a DDoS because of you, but you won't get a $100k bill.

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

#186

Post by jpalomaki »

injuly wrote: post #85
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-...

I'm hesitant to use "fancy" cloud service/hosting providers for reasons like this. I don't understand why they won't just raise a 503 if the traffic exceeds the spend limit, or at the very least provide that as an option.

Playing ”devil’s” advocate: tracking spend in real-time is not trivial. It adds complexity to stack. Bugs in the feature can cause sites to go down (for long time) without a reason. Larger online businesses likely rather sort out the problems later than risk shutting down in the middle of unexpected success.

(But I also would like to see this feature)

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

#188

Post by hardwaresofton »

Why is there no self-hostable Netlify yet?

Is it just that no one would pay for it? I'm well aware of how terrible a customer developers make, but has to be nearly a non-issue with Hetzner in the USA now, with how much free traffic they give you (or any other provider, DO, etc). There's even Cloudflare R2 nowadays.

Your blog probably doesn't actually need sub 100ms serve times.

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

#189

Post by auggierose »

gempir wrote: post #132
rKarpinski wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't make me feel great about Vercel either (which I was looking at)

Why? If you use Vercel in the Free Tier you cannot automatically go to the Pro tier. You need to manually upgrade. Unless you need more than the Free-Tier Vercel should be fine.

If you use Netlify in the free tier you cannot automatically go to pro tier either. Yet they will charge you for bandwidth > 100GB, and THERE IS NO WAY FOR YOU TO SWITCH THAT OFF, even in the free tier.

"Should be fine" is exactly what is not the case here. Better check your Vercel terms again.

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

#190

Post by mvdtnz »

whatever1 wrote: post #43
lopkeny12ko wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For less than 1% of OP's monthly bill, you can build or obtain a more-than-enough server, drop your static files on it, and serve through nginx. And you get to keep it forever; there's no monthly subscription fee! Seriously, maybe I'm just old, but I look at the pricing of these hip and modern SaaS products for dead simple software and I cannot believe my eyes. The "old fashioned way" works just fine (and has always…

But you need a static IP, stable internet, UPS, and permission from your wife to have a 24/7 powered noisy box in a room

You don't need a static IP. You can use dynamic DNS or a free product such as Cloudflare Tunnel.
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