Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

DigitalOcean App Platform

pages.news.digitalocean.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 357 posts

Re: DigitalOcean App Platform

#211

Post by user5994461 »

westoncb wrote: post #201
user5994461 wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Among articles you see on the front page, there is a two orders of magnitude difference in visits between the more popular and the less popular. HN/reddit/twitter/android can all send a similar amount of traffic. There's one order of magnitude there, how many places an article is featured at the same time? Then there's an order of magnitude within each place, how much interest and readership the article could gather?…

This sounds off. Both reddit and twitter have the potential for vastly more traffic than HN. I also haven’t had the number one spot on HN (except maybe briefly), but was in 2 and 3 for long stretches and even an order of magnitude more traffic wouldn’t have been a problem. Two orders probably would have been, but I have a hard time imagining a 100x traffic difference between the 1 spot and the 2 spot. Then again, if…

I assume you're targeting reddit programming and similar subs, they're similar to HN in aggregate. You're right that Reddit and twitter have way bigger audience in total but only a fraction of all reddit users is relevant. Assume we're talking about a tech blog, not articles on election or brexit?

It's not about rank. It's about the specifics of the article, mainly the title and the content. It simply attracts more or less readership.

Re: DigitalOcean App Platform

#212

Post by anamexis »

nathanstitt wrote: post #177
bit_logic wrote: post #174

I looked at the page and FAQ but can't find a clear answer for this: does this have billing limits? That's the main reason why I don't use AWS or any major cloud for personal projects because there's potential for unlimited cost if something goes wrong. I would rather have a hard billing limit that just shuts down everything if it reaches the limit.

Not sure about the other cloud providers, but AWS has billing limits with email warnings when you approach them. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/awsaccountbilling/latest/aboutv2...

They aren't limits though, the email warnings is the only thing they actually do.

Re: DigitalOcean App Platform

#213

Post by [deleted] »

mrkurt wrote: post #41
onion2k wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We do plan to let you set min and max bounds for autoscaling once it is implemented. This is exactly the sort of thing I'm talking about, but for money rather than computing resources or bandwidth. I'd like a feature that where the requirement is effectively "Fall back to a serving sorry-I'm-poor.html instead of the app if the total monthly bill has exceeded $xxx". For a side project I'm more interested in not paying…

For what it's worth, we (Fly.io) have this feature, and announced it as part of our launch post on HN. But literally no one has asked us to enable it on their apps. So we never made it self service. I think for most companies, it's better to set the expectation that the service costs money, bursts will cost more money, and then forgive outlier charges once or twice. It's tremendously difficult to compete against the…

[deleted]

Re: DigitalOcean App Platform

#214

Post by atymic »

Matheus28 wrote: post #197

$0.10/GiB bandwidth. Ouch. That's 10x what they charge for droplets exceeding their included bandwidth. Seems to follow the trend of grossly overcharging for bandwidth that most other PaaS providers do.

Yea, that was my thought exactly. It's nuts, considering they offer Space (S3 alternative) with 1TB out outbound for $5/m (ignoring the fact that they are providing 250gb of storage as well).

I was really keen on on until I saw that section.

Re: DigitalOcean App Platform

#215

Post by brightball »

earthboundkid wrote: post #132
user5994461 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big players have separate charges for bandwidth and disk and other hidden stuff. They are way more expensive than Digital Ocean / OVH all inclusive. Worse, the costs is unpredictable which makes them a no go for a side project, I can't risk accidentally getting a $1000 bill. As a real world example, I run a personal blog. If it were running on S3, my personal finance would have been obliterated when it got featur…

Can HN really deliver enough traffic to a static site to cost a significant amount? I've had mildly popular posts on HN for my Netlify blog (John Carmack tweeted about it!) and not had to pay for bandwidth.

I’ve had a couple of front page posts with good discussion. Generated about 35,000 unique visits over 24 hours.

Re: DigitalOcean App Platform

#216

Post by bleepblorp »

ev1 wrote: post #186
donmcronald wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. I don't think so. The concern for me is a lack of hard limit on spending on GCP, Azure, and AWS. If I screw up and allocate a bunch of resources unintentionally, I'm left holding the bill. That's a terrible setup for PaaS because all programming involves mistakes eventually, especially for new users learning the system. Granted, there are likely limits on accounts, but those are to protect the services from fraud…

It's a difference in goals. - Hobby kid doesn't want to overpay, shut everything down - Business absolutely doesn't care about spend, if they get some kind of marketing result traffic spike they just want the site to stay up even if it blows the average budget Guess which one they optimise for?

Very large businesses might not care about spend, but pretty much everyone else does.

Almost everyone will be unhappy if they're stuck with a six figure bill for non-converting visits because their site went viral. Everyone will be unhappy if they're stuck with a six figure bill because their site was used in a DDoS reflection attack, or got pwned and used in a DDoS attack directly.

Everything I run on nickle-and-dime-to-death cloud services, such as AWS, won't even respond to unauthenticated requests (Nginx return 444, or reachable only via Wireguard) precisely to mitigate this risk. To do anything else is just financially irresponsible.

I've even considered coding a kill switch that will shut down AWS instances if they exceed billing limits, but the fact that AWS charges a fee to check your spend via an API makes this awkward and speaks volumes about Amazon's motivations.

Amazon's refusal to offer spending caps on AWS benefits Amazon and only Amazon.

Re: DigitalOcean App Platform

#217

Post by dkersten »

pomatic wrote: post #127
tidepod12 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you call "premeditated and despicable" is actually a huge value proposition for others. Whereas AWS/GCP have pricing structures based on usage and you never know until the end of the month how much you owe, DO instead has defined "you will pay $50/mo for this regardless of if you do or do not use it" and from what I've seen, many people really value and appreciate that, and specifically choose DO over AWS/GCP be…

The problem I have is not with the model, but with the fact it is so difficult to cancel the standing charge. If it could be done from the web UI, and/or there was an interlinked pop-up when zero droplets are deployed, fine.

Wait, I'm confused. What standing charge? What exactly did you get charged for? I've been using DO for a few years and I have no idea what you are referring to. When I delete my unused resources, I don't get charged.

Re: DigitalOcean App Platform

#218

Post by ufmace »

SahAssar wrote: post #160
mrkurt wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes we advertised it as a feature to all new signups, with a link to request limits. It's not equivalent to a button, the dirty secret is that when people requested it, I planned to put a notification in my calendar to go look at their usage the last day of the month and adjust their bill accordingly. :) We were concerned about spending time on marginal features that didn't actually matter much to people, so we "laun…

I'm not one of your customers but when I have looked at pay-as-you-go services or autoscaling services before I basically don't even consider any that don't allow me to cap the costs per month or similar. So you could perhaps also consider that if it is only marketed when you sign up and not a clearly defined feature some people (like me) will just never sign up at all.

Personally, I don't think that capping costs explicitly is a good idea, because it doesn't carry enough information about what to do when you hit that cap.

Not even considering something like AWS with a bazillion types of services, say you have a cloud hosting service that runs nothing but auto-scaling clusters of servers billed by the hour. So I set a cap on costs but not cap on scaling up and turn it loose. It gets a hug of death from something, scales to the sky, does serve all of that traffic fine, but burns through my monthly cost cap in an hour. Oops, now it's down entirely for the next 3 weeks or whatever. Does anybody in the world who's willing to pay for hosting something actually want that? I have to doubt it.

On the other hand, capping the scaling size by number of hosts sounds pretty reasonable. Set a cap at say 2x your normal peak traffic. You get a hug from something, it hits the cap. Most of your extra traffic gets errors or really slow responses, but your service stays up, even when the traffic dies down. Your monthly costs are a bit higher than usual, but manageable. That sounds like a much better result to me.

That doesn't even get into stuff like, oh hey we dropped your DB server because you hit your cost cap early and it costs money to keep it running and to create a new backup too, hope you don't miss that data too much!

Re: DigitalOcean App Platform

#219

Post by llacb47 »

Please change the URL to

   https://www.digitalocean.com/blog/introducing-digitalocean-app-platform-reimagining-paas-to-make-it-simpler-for-you-to-build-deploy-and-scale-apps
Yours is tracking clicks.

Re: DigitalOcean App Platform

#220

Post by viraptor »

user5994461 wrote: post #207
viraptor wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's simply not true. I hit #1 a few times with content hosted on S3. Ended up paying maybe extra $2 those months. I'd be worried if I hosted any large files that came with it, but just a blog post? Barely noticeable.

I have images in almost every post. Diagram, schemas, stock images, gif, anything. I guess you don't? The difference between $2 and $20 will strike when you start having pictures and with $200 the day you (accidentally) put a large image or GIF.

You can lose money accidentally in many ways. I agree you have to watch out, but still disagree with the number of people dismissing S3 as a quick way to bankruptcy if you get HN #1.
Post reply on HN