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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

#211

Post by interstice »

jpalomaki wrote: post #186
injuly wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Vercel will happily tell you how much you are spending in pretty much realtime as it sails past your budget

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

#212

Post by INTPenis »

jpalomaki wrote: post #186
injuly wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Not really. AWS has budget alerts right? And I can read those budget alerts through their API.

So it would be trivial for me to poll their budget API for an alert, and immediatly trigger a shutdown of my Cloudfront service. Why can't they do that for me?

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

#213

Post by pacifika »

ignoramous wrote: post #129
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…

> Cloudflare's ddos protection Yeah, we got hammered once with over 10TB/mo and noped out of Netlify as fast as we could: https://twitter.com/rethinkdns/status/1370342245841342466 Had to pay the bill in full. Cloudflare's free tier is ridiculous: We do over 30TB+ of genuine traffic for $0. Makes it hard to move to any other platform. As a small tech shop, this is my Hotel California I'm happy to never leave.

That’s a free tier that doesn’t sound sustainable then, so that raises alarm bells to me.

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

#214

Post by malka »

throwawaaarrgh wrote: post #124
carlmr wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess we need regulation for this.

Or, rather than creating more regulations, people could read the contracts they agree to when they get service, and use a competitor if they don't like it

I don't know many people knowledgeable enough to read and understand legalese. Except lawyers ofc.

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

#215

Post by moritonal »

Nition wrote: post #122
isoprophlex wrote: post #14

There's no way in hell anyone should ever under any circumstance use a free service that might, for reasons entirely outside your control, suddenly bill you 5k, or 104k... or any non trivial amount really. Just suspend service on excessive overages...

Yeah. Elsewhere in these comments there's a link to a support thread[0] where Netlify support essentially says you shouldn't ever need an option to suspend your site at a certain point because: #1. If you think there's any chance of getting DDoSd, you should already be on a business plan instead of a starter tier. #2. If you think there's any chance of your site going viral, you're going to want to pay the cost anywa…

So anyone whos site might be posted to HN should be on a business plan.

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

#216

Post by arthur_sav »

carlmr wrote: post #100
sshine wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's spend limit? Autoscaling is a feature!

I guess we need regulation for this.

We don't need regulation for everything. Let customers vote with their wallet or even start a few lawsuits.

Adding more regulation makes the system slower.

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

#217

Post by AtNightWeCode »

yellow_lead wrote: post #181
AtNightWeCode wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

Workers run before the cache so I would avoid this for static sites. One can use workers for dynamic routes on a static site though.

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

#218

Post by hilux »

tomcam wrote: post #157
jamesdepp wrote: post #90

I recently rewrote a website/small backend API for a non-profit organization. I could've gone with a serverless architecture for our forms handling API and reduced spending to nearly the free tier, but I had no good way to protect against a scenario like this. There was just not good enough documentation about how to completely cut off spending in the scenario of an attack, and I wasn't comfortable leaving the organi…

I am confused. Why couldn’t GitHub Pages suffer a DDOS attack? Also they don’t want you using them for business purposes: https://docs.github.com/en/pages/getting-started-with-github...

Worth reading - thanks for sharing.

Arguably a non-profit (unless it was selling stuff from the site, which is unlikely) would be exempt from their list of prohibitions.

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

#219

Post by ilogik »

pacifika wrote: post #213
ignoramous wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Cloudflare's ddos protection Yeah, we got hammered once with over 10TB/mo and noped out of Netlify as fast as we could: https://twitter.com/rethinkdns/status/1370342245841342466 Had to pay the bill in full. Cloudflare's free tier is ridiculous: We do over 30TB+ of genuine traffic for $0. Makes it hard to move to any other platform. As a small tech shop, this is my Hotel California I'm happy to never leave.

That’s a free tier that doesn’t sound sustainable then, so that raises alarm bells to me.

it's 100% not sustainable. Use it while it's good, but don't get vendor locked in, because sooner or later they will increase the prices

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

#220

Post by lifthrasiir »

pacifika wrote: post #213
ignoramous wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Cloudflare's ddos protection Yeah, we got hammered once with over 10TB/mo and noped out of Netlify as fast as we could: https://twitter.com/rethinkdns/status/1370342245841342466 Had to pay the bill in full. Cloudflare's free tier is ridiculous: We do over 30TB+ of genuine traffic for $0. Makes it hard to move to any other platform. As a small tech shop, this is my Hotel California I'm happy to never leave.

That’s a free tier that doesn’t sound sustainable then, so that raises alarm bells to me.

I have heard that they rather drastically constrain QoS instead, which does sound reasonable. So you are still not charged for abusive traffic, but your service will be much slower than what is actually possible with paid tiers.
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