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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

#291

Post by hardwaresofton »

trog wrote: post #282
hardwaresofton wrote: post #188

Why is there no self-hostable Netlify yet? Is it just that no one would pay for it? I'm well aware of how terrible a customer developers make, but has to be nearly a non-issue with Hetzner in the USA now, with how much free traffic they give you (or any other provider, DO, etc). There's even Cloudflare R2 nowadays. Your blog probably doesn't actually need sub 100ms serve times.

https://coolify.io/ might be worth a look

Yeah there are a bunch of selfhostable things:

Caprover (https://caprover.com/)

Dokku (https://github.com/dokku/dokku)

But people still choose Netlify and Vercel for ease of use I think.

Maybe we need something that's just Netlify. The closest I've seen to the "right" UX is Ness:

https://ness.sh

Though of course it's a tui so some people will get turned off of that (especially people who are willing to spend).

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

#292

Post by nromiun »

whatshisface wrote: post #254
DontBreakAlex wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's because amazon and big telecom convinced you that bandwidth is expensive. It isn't. Once the equipment is there, you might as well use it.

Wouldn't there be at least a handful of competitors if the economics worked out that way?

There are a lot of them:

https://getdeploying.com/reference/data-egress

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

#294

Post by oefrha »

whatshisface wrote: post #254
DontBreakAlex wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's because amazon and big telecom convinced you that bandwidth is expensive. It isn't. Once the equipment is there, you might as well use it.

Wouldn't there be at least a handful of competitors if the economics worked out that way?

A good number of small hosts offer very cheap bandwidth compared to AWS. With Cloudflare’s economy of scale, their costs should be even lower. You only need a ~100Mbps link to serve 30TB/mo, which would cost them ~$10, maybe less.

They’ve written about it before: https://blog.cloudflare.com/aws-egregious-egress

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

#295

Post by gnyman »

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…

Yeah I'm doing the same, a combination of OVH, Scaleway and Hetzner.

Sure there is no such thing as "free unlimited" bandwidth but I much prefer unlimited with a fixed cost until they decide it's not worth it and shut me down vs unlimited risk with no ability to cap it.

The lack of cap is the worst part and it's 100% a business decision. Every provider who tracks bandwidth could add a cap but they just choose not to because it's too profitable and the risk is mostly* on the customer anyways.

*there is of course a tiny chance they the customer goes bankrupt and they get almost notning, but usually they just need to pretend to be nice and forgive all or most of it

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

#296

Post by aembleton »

WyvernDrexx wrote: post #140
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…

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.

I always run mine through Cloudflare, at least in part for this reason.

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

#297

Post by signaru »

jeroenhd wrote: post #204
hayst4ck wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Y…

Any suggestions for hosts that will just make your site offline once it reaches its tier limit? Cloudflare and Netlify get suggested a lot and I was considering one of them before this.

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

#298

Post by immibis »

DontBreakAlex wrote: post #233
pacifika wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That's because amazon and big telecom convinced you that bandwidth is expensive. It isn't. Once the equipment is there, you might as well use it.

Well, they have to pay for the amortized equipment cost. Which, yes, is much less than you think. The big 3 clouds have set their prices in an age when services were much more expensive to provide, and they make a big deal out of the fact they've never raised their prices - but they rarely lower them, either. Now they have insane profit margins.

The invisible hand of the free market has come to fix that, *but you have to opt into the hand by shopping around.* If you don't, you don't get its benefits! You have to willingly take the choice to move to cheaper providers instead of overpriced ones.

Hetzner Cloud: $1/TB (20TB free) Digital Ocean: $10/TB (few TB free depending on server size) AWS: $90/TB (0.1TB free, used to be 0.001TB free) Netlify: $550/TB (0.1TB or 1TB free)

If you move up from $5/month VPSes, to real dedicated servers, you are now spending a lot more money and therefore you get more free perks. A huge number of providers exist that will give you unlimited or unlimited† bandwidth depending on how much you spend. Renting a powerful server with unlimited 1Gbps should cost a few hundred to several hundred dollars per month, and a powerful server with unlimited 10Gbps (i.e. 3000TB/month) should cost a few thousand dollars per month. You can even get some with 100Gbps (for tens of thousands).

Also consider asking your local ISPs and datacenters. If you live in a central area, you can probably get a comparable connection to a nearby datacenter if not straight to your office, for a comparable price. Data center connections are their bread and butter and they should be able to give you a quote quite rapidly; to your office will be a more custom thing.

Recently I got a quote for AMS-IX peering in Berlin, i.e. a peering in Amsterdam plus a link from Amsterdam to Berlin, about a 600km distance. That would cost 950 euros per month. If 1Gbps, it would cost 300 euros per month. Even though it's not really got anything to do with internet access (transit), I include this number to give some indication of the "true" cost of "raw" bandwidth.

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

#299

Post by xrisk »

rubymamis wrote: post #239
itake wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm moving everything to Cloudflare.

I'm trying to sign up but it keeps saying "Verification is taking longer than expected. Check your Internet connection and refresh the page if the issue persists." Does anyone else experience this as well?

Might be iCloud private relay if you use that

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

#300

Post by chgs »

codewithcheese wrote: post #178
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…

Vervel charges $400/TB for excess bandwidth, it's not even DDoS you should worry about, just moderate success.

That’s a crazy high bandwidth. Bandwidth isn’t free, but $400 will get you a month of 10gig in my local peering point, that’s 1TB in 15 minutes.
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