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It would be really classy if MS forgave that debt, especially considering the service is a public benefit.
I would go as far as saying that the hosting for such a service should be entirely sponsored by Microsoft.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As opposed to all those other customers who are not good faith actors?
You’re trying to be snarky to GP, why exactly? Yes there are bad faith actors that might try to get some free cash out of cloud refunds. And other customers can also be good faith actors and included in the assertion. The post applies to everyone and I’d second it. Ask nicely for a refund in these situations, the worst that can happen is they say no. Where did they say that “only Troy Hunt shall receive a refund, for…
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 impossible to miss it for a long time.
Have you contacted Azure? On one hand you owe the money “fair and square”, but on the other if I were them I’d waive an unexpected $10k bill to a good faith actor that was incurred without any proactive notification by Azure.
I've seen several cases on both Azure and AWS that bills got weaved after someone opened support ticket starting with "oops, I just did..."
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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.
Get a VPS from linode for $5 a month and it costs $5 a month.
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.
This is very straight forward from their view, before: almost no traffic = almost no costs, now: huge traffic = $$$.
On the other hand, it doesn't seem that Troy did try to talk to them about this and seems to want to eat the costs himself. As it was his mistake. I think that's commendable. I also think with the amount of free advertisement Troy has done for them they'd be open to this and I can imagine we might see a followup post like "MS was so nice they waived my costs".
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.
Convenience always costs money, there is no (big) cloud provider doing it out of their own pocket or rather not optimizing for huge profits.
It's the same as with any other service, really. So I don't understand, why some people assume it would be different here.
(Note: I am not saying that Troy Hunt assumed this, but I know people who go to the cloud because "It's cheaper". It was never cheaper, on no project I worked on. It was more convenient, but in the end it was more expensive mostly)
Seems at least a little unethical that cloud companies do pay as you go up to infinity, instead of some model where you transfer money in and if you use it all up your service gets cut.