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

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

old.reddit.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

301–310 of 836 posts

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

#301

Post by dstroot »

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…

Can anyone share an example of edge middleware that might protect you on Vercel?

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

#302

Post by chgs »

niceice wrote: post #148
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…

How do these hosting providers sleep?

In enormous mansions atop large piles of money.

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

#303

Post by kiprou »

nanna wrote: post #193

A few years ago I taught an introduction to website developmment module at a university where students built jekyll sites. I got them to to host on netlify. Now that I no longer teach at that uni and their email accounts will have expired I'm wondering if there's any way I can contact them to tell them to take their sites off netlify... Disaster if they get hit by charges like this.

At the rate it's going this story will probably reach them without your help.

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

#304

Post by [deleted] »

SXX wrote: post #82
mythz wrote: post #46

More reasons why I avoid clouds with outrageous bandwidth fees, and prefer Hetzner's low cost fixed pricing with Cloudflare R2's 0 egress fees. Even if the DDoS wasn't caught by Cloudflare, the total cost for 192TB bandwidth on Hetzner would be €172. Although even after 10 years on Hetzner I've never paid for any bandwidth, always well within their generous 20TB free bandwidth.

First of all Hetzner would't let your server to be DDOSed for 192TB if it's not your normal usage. They'll likely just null route your IP if serious attack hit. They also likely drop any charges if you escalate via support in case it was actually DDOS. E.g if you normally have 100GB / month and now you magically have 50TB / day. What Netlify does is a scam.

[deleted]

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

#305

Post by immibis »

arthur_sav wrote: post #216
carlmr wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'd be in favour of a regulation to allow them to set a spend limit, opt-out.

I'm fine with their pricing structure right now, since you have PLENTY of providers to choose from - people can easily vote with their wallets and there's no problem that needs solving.

However, the unexpected spikes are a problem, and providers seemingly don't provide any way to solve them because they make more money by not solving them. A regulation to require all providers of post-billed services to provide spending limits would make a lot of sense.

Of course, customers should also have the option to opt out of the limit or set a very high limit.

This should apply to any service that's billed by usage calculated afterwards, not just web hosting, and not just technology.

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

#306

Post by EE84M3i »

cube2222 wrote: post #258
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.

CloudFlare pricing is indeed positively ridiculous. At OpenTofu[0] we’re using CloudFlare R2 to host the providers and modules registry[1]. Bandwidth is free, you only pay for requests. This already would be great, but there’s more - you only pay for requests that actually hit R2. So with an almost 100% cache hit ratio, we barely register any billable requests. Recently someone decided to load test us and generated ~…

Is this in line with the TOS? I thought there were restrictions on serving non-website content in the free tier, or does that not apply to the CDN if you're using R2 as an origin?

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

#307

Post by mourner »

KingOfCoders wrote: post #16
triyambakam wrote: post #2

So if I want to migrate off of netlify to something better, where?

I use BunnyCDN to host several sites, they have a minimum cost of $1 per month and I usually pay $1 per month. I run my sites [0] on Hugo and copy the generated sites (Makefile) to BunnyCDN with their command line tool. It's a plain CDN, but does include DNS hosting for easy SSL certificates and has scriptable DNS [1] where you can run Javascript for dynamic DNS. I went with them b/c they are in the EU, but I've stay…

Love Bunny too, wonderful service and great team. I wish there'd be an easy way to set up auto-deploy to Bunny Edge Storage on GitHub commit (to avoid doing so manually), but I guess it's not to hard to do through GitHub Actions.

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

#308

Post by aembleton »

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...

Use a virtual card with just a small amount of money on it to limit your liability. Won't work if you've entered a contract, but for a lot of these providers, including AWS it works.

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

#309

Post by throwaway290 »

stavros wrote: post #286
throwaway290 wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you'd be either slow or pay them "for protection". Something that reminds me of;)

Capitalism? Mob-style "protection" would be if Cloudflare were the ones who DDoSed you if you didn't pay.

How naive if you think the mob would disclose when it's affiliates trash your shop.

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

#310

Post by raxxorraxor »

jefozabuss wrote: post #136
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…

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.

That is my setup after leaving AWS for some of my services (low user amount b2b).

I put in far less resources and maintenance after I had the system running. Especially if you need to manage the software running anyway.

Post reply on HN