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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

#201

Post by Winsaucerer »

rozenmd wrote: post #154
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

I was looking for a static site hosting option recently and tried out cloudflare pages. Fit my need perfectly. The generous free tier and the reasonable pricing model were the big factors.

Oh, and the ability to put some authentication in front of it was a big feature for me.

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

#204

Post by jeroenhd »

hayst4ck wrote: post #57
LiamPowell wrote: post #12

I don't see why people are surprised by this or why people are calling it a scam. Netlify and others are extremely transparent about the fact that there are no limits. I completely understand not liking it and can see why the lack of limits would make it a bad option for plenty of people, but I don't see how it can possibly be called a scam.

Because it's unbounded liability. Not to mention the strong conflict of interest for netlify, who stands to gain from their customers being attacked. Netlify is getting paid for something criminal in nature having occurred. It's like who is responsible for credit card fraud? If customers are responsible for credit card fraud, and it's their responsibility not to get scammed, then who implements fraud prevention measu…

Companies like these give out ridiculously huge free tiers in the hopes that very few users end up using the high free bandwidth limits. In most cases, they do. However, they do need to make their money back somehow.

I don't really get why people put their tiny static sites on hosts designed to never fall over no matter the traffic generated, no matter the situation. You're running a blog, not a government service. You don't need AWS or Netlify.

The ability to withstand almost any DDoS attack for a high price is a valuable service. It's not a scam. The people who get these huge bills just picked a hosting service that doesn't fit their requirements. I can promise you that the $3 shared hosting providers won't charge you $5k, five minutes after the DDoS starts your site just goes down.

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

#205

Post by mythz »

Culonavirus wrote: post #182
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…

I also take advantage of their free services and only pay for R2 on Cloudflare since it's the best value managed provider I could find.

I prefer to keep my App's stateless and running in Docker containers which means storing all uploaded files and generated assets in R2 managed storage - which is also used for Litestream backups of our SQLite databases.

Blowouts are minimized when using low cost services, e.g. we had a rogue process that ended up causing 1.5M writes to R2, which only ended up costing us $4.50 in that month.

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

#206

Post by welder »

tasuki wrote: post #94
satvikpendem wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hetzner or DigitalOcean with Coolify [0] works great, it's like an open source Heroku that runs on any host, you get git push to deploy, and a bunch of other features built in. It only works on one machine at a time though so it's not like a CDN but for small sites, it's great. [0] https://coolify.io

I use DigitalOcean to host some things (with my own setup for deployments with git push, because `curl | bash` is not a great way to install/maintain software). How am I protected against extra charges for traffic?

Same here, using DigitalOcean instead of Vercel to host my Next.js app. I have a billing alert to notify of unexpected bills, but I don't know what DO does if somehow TBs of traffic are sent to my apps or Cloudflare, because DO App Platform actually uses Cloudflare behind the scenes.

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

#207

Post by jug »

LiamPowell wrote: post #12

I don't see why people are surprised by this or why people are calling it a scam. Netlify and others are extremely transparent about the fact that there are no limits. I completely understand not liking it and can see why the lack of limits would make it a bad option for plenty of people, but I don't see how it can possibly be called a scam.

I understand the lack of limits but I haven't accounted for DDoS attacks on Netlify infrastructure to impact me. I was assuming this only included real, "organic" traffic.

What I think Netlify needs on their Plans page is to include "DDoS attacks is included in your traffic" as well as their 20%/5% charge system.

> and can see why the lack of limits would make it a bad option for plenty of people

Just out of curiosity, can you see any scenario where it WOULD be a decent option to use a free tier where you may be hit by a $20,000 or $5,000 bill out of the blue and outside of your control? You say "plenty" so I assume you consider this a reasonable system to some?

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

#208

Post by hereonout2 »

stanac wrote: post #173

I just checked pricing on hetzner (not affiliated with them). First 20 TB are included with VM price, after which it's 1.19 euros per TB. If this happened to someone hosting there it would cost them additional 50 euros. Can't believe the difference in traffic pricing. Netlify is over 1000x more expensive per TB.

People will throw up all sorts of excuses for not just renting a VM for a static site - scalability, ease of use, security.

But in the vast majority of cases you could just take a $5 VM, apt-get install nginx and be absolutely fine. A tiny bit more effort and you can make sure it's always up to date and very secure. Plus you get a VM you can use for other things when needed.

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

#209

Post by KingOfCoders »

thinkingemote wrote: post #179
KingOfCoders wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use BunnyCDN to host several sites, they have a minimum cost of $1 per month and I usually pay $1 per month. I run my sites [0] on Hugo and copy the generated sites (Makefile) to BunnyCDN with their command line tool. It's a plain CDN, but does include DNS hosting for easy SSL certificates and has scriptable DNS [1] where you can run Javascript for dynamic DNS. I went with them b/c they are in the EU, but I've stay…

Looks nice but then so does Netlify at face level! Seems like it is pay as you go, and there is a settable max spend per month. Does their ddos protection work differently than Netlify and could Bunny ever pull the same stunt with billing?

No they don't do Ddos protection AFAIK.

I think the main difference to me is

  Netlify  $550/TB [0]
  BunnyCDN  $10/TB [1]
You preload your account:

"In order to keep your service online, you are required to keep a positive account credit balance. Our system will automatically send multiple warning emails if your account balance drops beyond a certain point. If you fail to recharge your account, the system will automatically suspend your account"

[0] https://getdeploying.com/reference/data-egress

[1] https://bunny.net/pricing/

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

#210

Post by boredtofears »

apsurd wrote: post #155
boredtofears wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 resourc…

yes, you need to spend the time to learn about the environment you are hosting your app in and then suddenly it won't seem like "voodoo" as much. you absolutely can set this up in 10 minutes (probably much quicker if you are adept with various infra tooling). theres even wizard dialogs for most of the things you've described right in the AWS UI nowadays.
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