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I got pwned by my cloud costs

troyhunt.com

221–230 of 657 posts

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably would run just fine on a <= 4 euro/month virtual machine too. Of course it doesn't quite scale to zero like APIGW,lambda,etc. but on the other hand you can be fairly confident to not pay more if your pet project suddenly lands on the front page of HN.

Keep in mind that the "<= 4 euro/month virtual machine" has maybe 256MB of RAM available and running anything beyond nginx + a web server which needs to be cycled every few days due to memory fragmentation can become challenging. I've tried this many times, but it's just not worth the extra hassle. And I want a vpn, monitoring and database even on the toy project server as a minimum in reality.

> Keep in mind that the "For ~4€/month (depending on your country), Hetzner offers "Hetzner Cloud" servers with 2GB of RAM, see https://www.hetzner.com/cloud?country=us

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably would run just fine on a <= 4 euro/month virtual machine too. Of course it doesn't quite scale to zero like APIGW,lambda,etc. but on the other hand you can be fairly confident to not pay more if your pet project suddenly lands on the front page of HN.

Keep in mind that the "<= 4 euro/month virtual machine" has maybe 256MB of RAM available and running anything beyond nginx + a web server which needs to be cycled every few days due to memory fragmentation can become challenging. I've tried this many times, but it's just not worth the extra hassle. And I want a vpn, monitoring and database even on the toy project server as a minimum in reality.

[deleted]

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#223
post #56

Can somebody explain to me why I wouldn't just rent a 40 EUR dedicated server from Hetzner with unlimited traffic and gigabit uplink? His 600GB/day is way less than what you get over a gigabit link within a day. Sure, sudden bursts would perhaps "throttle" at a gigabit, but according to his article that was only the cloudflare proxy anyhow, so no pain in having that take a few seconds longer. As far as I am concerned…

> As far as I am concerned, I just don't understand why people use cloud services. For companies the benefits are the abiltiy to get new servers at a click of a button and get rid of a server. For example, asking the ops team to setup a snapshot of a database for a few hours while I do something is super useful. There is also the ability to use autoscale and other stuff to automagically scale your system to handle tr…

Hetzner dedicated server * 3 + k3s + vnet + longhorn + metallb = basically the cloud.

I can snapshot a database disk with a click of a button and restore the snapshot with yet another few clicks.

I have 1.5 TB of highly available disk space, 40 cores of full CPU power, 160 GB of RAM, & dynamically provisioned IPs for metallb. For only $130USD a month. For the same price in Azure, I had 6 CPU cores & 8 GB RAM.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably would run just fine on a <= 4 euro/month virtual machine too. Of course it doesn't quite scale to zero like APIGW,lambda,etc. but on the other hand you can be fairly confident to not pay more if your pet project suddenly lands on the front page of HN.

Keep in mind that the "<= 4 euro/month virtual machine" has maybe 256MB of RAM available and running anything beyond nginx + a web server which needs to be cycled every few days due to memory fragmentation can become challenging. I've tried this many times, but it's just not worth the extra hassle. And I want a vpn, monitoring and database even on the toy project server as a minimum in reality.

Maybe 5+ years ago. These days ~4€/month gets you 2GB of RAM, SSD storage and plenty of bandwidth.

Hetzner has such a VPS offering (2GB RAM/20GB nvme SSD/20TB bandwidth), netcup has one for ~3€, contabo has 8GB/50GB nvme/32TB for 6€/month and there are plenty of smaller companies around the world offering similar deals (usually somewhat less included bandwidth outside europe though).

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To make a fair comparison you need to consider the time cost for setting all of that other stuff up compared to having it out of the box. I'd an engineer on 100k takes a week to get it up and running then your vps cost 2k to set up and 40/month going forwards.

You'd have to figure out the setting up stuff just once though and then automate it. It's not like you have to go through this for every additional server you will add in the future or when you have to rebuild it. Also, it doesn't take a week.

> You'd have to figure out the setting up stuff just once though and then automate it.

You're assuming that this is for recurringly set up infrastructure. Sometimes infra is set up once and maintained, othertimes it's set up and spun down. It's also not always automated. The time spent automating something like that might not be worth it in the medium to even long term.

> Also, it doesn't take a week.

The actual amount of time it takes doesn't matter; if it's a day or a month. what matters is costing the time spent on setting it up and maintaining it, and pricing that against AWS costs.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that good. I'm constantly getting "Access Blocked" to various websites by Cloudflare trying to protect them....from me reading them.

I never do. Maybe you or something on your computer or network is the problem?

If you configured your client to hide enough information, Cloudflare tends to believe you are a threat. VPN users probably have that problem a lot more.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#227
post #56

Can somebody explain to me why I wouldn't just rent a 40 EUR dedicated server from Hetzner with unlimited traffic and gigabit uplink? His 600GB/day is way less than what you get over a gigabit link within a day. Sure, sudden bursts would perhaps "throttle" at a gigabit, but according to his article that was only the cloudflare proxy anyhow, so no pain in having that take a few seconds longer. As far as I am concerned…

Perhaps for the same reason that the vast majority of the readers of this site don’t use Hetzner: they are not European and neither are their users.

Hetzner launched in the US by now

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#228
post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How's that? Setting up a revers nginx proxy with cache takes probably less than an hour even if you've never done it (speaking from experience). And otherwise, if the files don't change that much just ssh in, copy them on the server and serve them via nginx and cloudflare tunnel? I'm in no way a sysadmin and have set up these configurations manually in less than an hour for side projects. Cloudflare tunnel also allow…

Ah sorry I should have been clearer on this -- "global cache" === CDN. Hetzner does incur a performance latency (unless you use the brand new US DC of course, and your customer happens to be in the US). IIRC right now you can't mix US cloud servers and German ones in the same Load balancer (also a relatively new hetzner cloud feature) but of course you can do some DNS tricks and get the loads to be fast. Actually hos…

Why not use CloudFlare in front? That's what was being used anyway, as per the article.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#229
post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny that even Hetzner can do that and AWS can't. Shows that there's no interest from AWS to prevent these things from happening.

IMO this is something which ought to be written into law. It'd be easy to implement a kill switch, and would actually encourage innovation, as people would feel more empowered to experiment with the technology.

Absolutely, and I would make it a bit broader: Anything that automatically charges a client a variable amount should have a maximum-spend limit that the client can set, and it should default to a reasonable number based on the client's expected usage.

In fact, you could even just change that to any auto-billing service or product and the default for constant-charge services would simply be the amount of the constant charge.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#230
It seems like everyone is blaming azure when this was an issue with CloudFlare…

I get that everyone has an obsession with dirt cheap providers instead of cloud solutions like aws/azure. But that doesn’t mean it’s better. Everything has pros and cons.

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