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My First AWS “Free Tier” Hosting Bill Was $990
21–30 of 63 posts
Re: My First AWS “Free Tier” Hosting Bill Was $990
#22I wish AWS had hard spending limits.
Azure have one - you spend over the set limit(probably per billing account?) and your services are suspended. Already saved my from unexpected bill this month.
Re: My First AWS “Free Tier” Hosting Bill Was $990
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
FTA: > To Amazon's credit, they removed the bills from my account and gave me free hosting credits to make up for it. Their support was swift and professional.
Perhaps it sounds a bit odd, but in most business settings, I'd rather be paying double and have service like this than be paying half without that customer service. Generous policies like these avoid headaches, and headaches are much more expensive than machines.
With a model like this- you're only getting your money's worth while you're regularly making mistakes. If everything is going smoothly, you're just paying double for no reason.
I dislike when the value proposition gets muddied like this.
Re: My First AWS “Free Tier” Hosting Bill Was $990
#24tl;dr: Author opted for not actually using "Free Tier" and ignored all the (subtile) warnings.
> I didn't know what "Multi-AZ Deployment" nor "Provisioned IOPS Storage" were, nor did I care.
No. RTFM and look up all the terms you're not familiar with.
> Production is production, right?
Right.
Re: My First AWS “Free Tier” Hosting Bill Was $990
#25I wish AWS had hard spending limits. Azure have one - you spend over the set limit(probably per billing account?) and your services are suspended. Already saved my from unexpected bill this month.
Just setup billing alarms. Spend is reported continuously. These people surprised by end of month bills just aren’t paying attention to all the data AWS shows you on your spend.
If they hard shut people down then people would be posting “AWS turned off my services and took my site down blah blah blah”
Re: My First AWS “Free Tier” Hosting Bill Was $990
#26If we are trading war stories:
I was playing around with some tutorial to learn something (probably something cool like programming your own robotic drone using functional erlang or whatever), pushed to github and went to sleep. Woke up a few short hours later and had lots of emails about the machines I was spinning up.
Checked and saw that my account had wracked up thousands of dollars overnight (I think 6-8 hours), and I started to shut down the machines.
I didn't get them all, there were more machines hidden, and the bills continued to pile up for another hour or two.
I contacted Amazon who shut it all down, and I reset my password.
Then I realized I had pushed my credentials to github (I should really put this under a pseudonym, but I was new to the whole thing and hadn't even looked into Amazon's authentication system. Obviously, billing credentials and sysadmin credentials should never be the same.) Someone had a scraper going that picked them up almost right away.
To Amazon's credit, they cancelled the charges within a few hours, and if memory serves the person investigating gave me a sympathetic but stern message.
I don't know who the credential-stealer was and what they were using it for, but I would guess crypto mining. I did some calculation at the time and I think they would have extracted about 1/3rd the value of my bill, but those were rough calculations.
Re: My First AWS “Free Tier” Hosting Bill Was $990
#27I completely wasted $500 of free google cloud credit from having a 2 core Windows VM "idling" for a couple of days... thank god I checked the balance
Re: My First AWS “Free Tier” Hosting Bill Was $990
#28If using AWS for personal use the first step should always be to set up a billing alarm. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/monitori... It’s very helpful. You can still end up overspending but at least you get an email within a day letting you know what’s going on, which can solve a lot of the cost overruns by giving you a chance to act quickly and only get hit with 1/30 the monthly fee.
Why is this an extra step instead of something AWS always does?
As both services and permissions multiply, the user experience of AWS is getting worse and worse. How would you even know to setup CloudWatch if it’s your first time using the service?
Re: My First AWS “Free Tier” Hosting Bill Was $990
#29I have to admit, AWS isn't easy.
I did two associate cers, just because, and after getting them I had the impression that I vastly underestimated the difficulty of using AWS.
If you really know what you're doing, AWS is probably much better and often even cheaper than everything else, but most people simply can't put in the time.
Re: My First AWS “Free Tier” Hosting Bill Was $990
#30My girlfriend's first "Free Tier" hosting build was $5200 for ingesting a single document on Kendra. After nearly a month of working with the service team she was able to get the bill removed (even the service team did not know how to delete the app). Its insane that an overage charge on a "Free tier" service can be the price of a used car or multiple months of rent.
Well their free tier is a list of free amounts you can consume of various services. Azure and GCP require you to switch to a Pay as you go scheme if you want to spend money. But AWS from day one you can consume things that cost money.
They say you get 30 days of free usage but with a 5k a month cost, no way I'd risk it with my card. https://aws.amazon.com/kendra/pricing/