Good reminder, just moved my blog to cloudflare pages!
Netlify just sent me a $104k bill for a simple static site
241–250 of 836 posts
Re: Netlify just sent me a $104k bill for a simple static site
#242I 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.
Just regular managed web hosting is enough for simple websites for people who don't actually want to manage a whole server. You don't have to manage anything with such a plan, just put your files where you're told and that's all. It's how simple websites have worked for decades.
Hetzner's plans start at 1,76€/month with a domain name included and unlimited traffic. OVH is slightly cheaper.
I'm probably too old (?) to understand the appeal of Netlify or other similar services, but I really don't understand why they get used.
By the way, Netlify says "100 GB bandwidth" is included with the free plan which I thought mirrored Hetzner's number of "30 TBit total bandwidth", but you have to click the details to see that it's 100 GB per month. So not bandwidth at all, but traffic.
Re: Netlify just sent me a $104k bill for a simple static site
#243I hope you don't live in the US buddy... If you don't, you're probably fine. If you do and Netlify decides to go after you, it's probably gonna be tough and costly.
Which is crucial Netlify is called out for this. Hiding behind the "fine print" is pathetic, not a way to do business.
Re: Netlify just sent me a $104k bill for a simple static site
#244Earlier 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.
Their stock performance would agree
Re: Netlify just sent me a $104k bill for a simple static site
#245There is a lot to be said for just hosting your own VPS and learning how it works especially for smaller sites. The effort to host is small and you're not going to get smashed with a bill like this.
Re: Netlify just sent me a $104k bill for a simple static site
#246I must add that at Netlify are consistent across disparate systems.
They consistently missed someone that doesn't get more than 10GB traffic a month now maxing out a 5Gbps line (60TB/day stated in TFA) for several days in a row.
And consistently missed someone with a tiny bill's now racking up 10s of thousands of dollars per day. Even if they do run a mainframe and batch process at the end of each day, that still went a few days. If extending lines of credit of tens of thousands of dollars is legal, that's very generous.
What further consistency is available at Netlify?
Re: Netlify just sent me a $104k bill for a simple static site
#247This 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…
If you want to sleep tight just get a dedicated server or VPS from something like Hetzner and/or combine with CDN providers like BunnyCDN - set up alerts just in case though. It takes more time and resources to manage it but you could save a lot on it in this case.
This so much. My hetzner (best choice for a media server within Europe) has 0 downtime in 1.5 years. And exactly as you said I am using bunny as well, which costs me a few $ per year.
Re: Netlify just sent me a $104k bill for a simple static site
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
I guess we need regulation for this.
Why do we need regulation? "Keep the service up no matter what happens, no matter the cost" is a useful business model for companies that make the mistake of promising too many nines to their customers. The issue at hand is that people put small websites on hosting providers designed for megacorporation wealth, like Netlify. I highly doubt the average blog needs more than a $10 VPS located in one single country witho…
> You can probably even go with a $5 VPS...
You wouldn't believe the amount of times I've said this and the response was "but it costs me nothing right now"...
Re: Netlify just sent me a $104k bill for a simple static site
#249This 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…
Imagine you lost your job. So you are here enjoying creating and hosting your hobby projects in theses services. Now, suddenly one fine morning you get slapped with $104K bill because someone decided to randomly ddos your one page dog lover website. Now, who in the would would be thinking of having ddos protection for their hobby project? This is just absurd thinking.
No. This is absolutely common. I remember well how shared hosters 10 years ago already put caps on cheap packages and took the websites offline in case of traffic. And today it's Amazon who bills small players into dept.
There are many provider who don't tho.