Earlier quoted context omitted.
So, go to a different provider?
More like don't start a business at all because of provider risk.
Or use a provider with a predictable cost structure. There are PLENTY. You didn't need to choose this exact one.
Netlify just sent me a $104k bill for a simple static site
311–320 of 836 posts
Re: Netlify just sent me a $104k bill for a simple static site
#312Earlier 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.
Microsoft is the only cloud provider with a spending limit. One choice is not competition. That's why regulation is needed.
Re: Netlify just sent me a $104k bill for a simple static site
#313Here is my shiny new super business plan for a startup that will profit thousands from a supposedly non-paying customer:
1. Offer “free static website” with lots of templates and guides to help you build one
2. The first 100GB is free and beyond that it’s $0.01/MB. But no worries! Very few customers actually use up that free bandwidth and in case you need more you can purchase packages for $100/TB. Also we offer a free service that will help you get your site more visible by advertising it, it’s included by default.
3. After a month or so, randomly help a customer bump the website and make it popular by putting it in some list that is frequently crawled. Secretly hire someone else to crawl these websites and make lots of download requests
4. Once the customer suddenly gets 10TB of traffic, bill them for 9900GB which is $99000
5. As long as 1 out of 100 customers pay, you are profiting $990 per customer! For the rest of customers, offer a 5% discount so they only have to pay $1980. Threat taking them to collections if they refuse.
Become the next millionare by just selling free static websites to 1000 customers! Anyone join us?
Re: Netlify just sent me a $104k bill for a simple static site
#314Earlier quoted context omitted.
Host on a provider which bills per hour. This caps your cost. It also makes your users pissed because you will go down, but if you’re small, you can afford that. If you’re big, you already have scaling options and should have a team to handle ddos.
Yeah. Any host that won't infinitely scale out will solve this concern for you.
I think most people pick Netlify for it's Infra as a Service offering, so it would be nice if they had a way to throttle and budget in that offering.
I would even imagine Netlify's target market is small to mid size businesses who really don't need ridiculous burstable scaling capacity at all. Seems like a bit of a trap door for that customer base.
I agree though, I wouldn't host on them as a small business due to that risk, but I am also happy running my own server so I might be an edge case.
Re: Netlify just sent me a $104k bill for a simple static site
#315We need a separate ‘shame’ tab at the top for crap like this. There must be so many more of these asshole bills being sent out that aren’t lucky enough to get voted up.
Re: Netlify just sent me a $104k bill for a simple static site
#316Earlier 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)
[deleted]
Re: Netlify just sent me a $104k bill for a simple static site
#317Netlify CEO here.
Our support team has reached out to the user from the thread to let them know they're not getting charged for this.
It's currently our policy to not shut down free sites during traffic spikes that doesn't match attack patterns, but instead forgiving any bills from legitimate mistakes after the fact.
Apologies that this didn't come through in the initial support reply.
Re: Netlify just sent me a $104k bill for a simple static site
#318Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://render.com/ is free for static sites with custom domain support and SSL included. been happy so far! used to use s3 for the longest time, but aside from costing a nominal fee, it's so unnecessarily complicated in this day and age.
Keep in mind that according to their forum you'll be charged $30/100GB for bandwidth over free allowance of 100GB: https://community.render.com/t/confused-about-the-free-tier/... > Exceeding allotted Bandwidth does result in automatic overage charges. $30 for additional 100 GB blocks. So the same shady pracrice as on Netlify.
wow, thanks for mentioning that, though I'm wondering how this would work, since they didn't ask for any name/billing information at signup...
Re: Netlify just sent me a $104k bill for a simple static site
#319I’m stunned there is no way to limit spend and have warning and a cap on a service like that. You should be able to specify billing thresholds and have sensible defaults when the downside is basically unlimited. Basic customer UX.
Re: Netlify just sent me a $104k bill for a simple static site
#320> And since my amount is too large, they offer to discount to 5%, which means I still need to pay 5 thousand dollars. If they just reduce to 5% like that, it shows how disconnected this is from their real bandwidth cost. Really does feel like a scam.
They overcharge egress by about 500x https://getdeploying.com/reference/data-egress . So even a reduction to 0.2% would habe been possible. Honestly don't understand why anyone feels comfortable overpaying so much. Especially when there is no configurable spending limit.
It wouldn’t be possible for them. Netlify doesn’t own transit, so AWS needs to get their fat cut even if Netlify waives their fatter cut.