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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

#371
post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This may seem weird, but I believe ToS ae the real problem here. I call it the "car rental" problem. When I rent a car in person, I am often given a contract. And this contract is filled with tiny print, and pages of it. There are often people behind you, waiting, and bored/annoyed people behind the counter, waiting. This is beyond unreasonable. A point of sale contract should be short, in readable text, and understa…

> When I rent a car in person, I am often given a contract. And this contract is filled with tiny print, and pages of it.

As someone who reads the agreements I sign, one thing that has become prevalent is that they're so used to people not paying attention to what they're signing that they're sometimes not even giving you an accurate copy to review. For example, you read the thing and think, "Okay, I can work within these parameters," then you sign, and later get an email containing your "agreement", but it turns out what's in the email is a different set of terms with a bunch of stuff that wasn't in the terms you actually agreed to when you signed. Or someone hands you a pad with an "I agree to the terms" box checked beside the signature line, and when you ask to see the terms you're agreeing to, they're caught off guard (being totally unequipped to let you do that), which turns into being flummoxed with how to proceed, which turns into getting angry with you for asking.

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

#372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Same.

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

#374
post #44

Since the author has gone viral I expect some netlify exec is going to take over and write this bill off to $0. In the words of Kramer “these big companies, they just write it off!” A moment of silence for the people who got DDoS-ed, didn’t go viral and still had to pay $5k.

The very fact that you expect that making front page of hn will make them cancel that bill means that it will soon be over. These kind of stories (alongside cancelled accounts) repeat over and over again and will soon become so not newsworthy that they will either not end up in front page, nor people will check on the eventual outcome which means these companies will get away with not moving a finger.

Nah. I think the dev community has long memory. Events like this is damaging for years. Whenever Netlify is mentioned, someone will inevitably point to this thread for a few years.

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

#375
This is going to be a dumb question. I am new to coding ( 3 months in ). I am building a simple static personal website with GitHub pages. I am worried since I had to input billing data to GitHub for my global campus application since I am a student.

Is this something I need to worry about? Does cloudflare provide a service that is cheap that can prevent something like this for my GitHub pages site?

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

#376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are only two questions everyone have: 1. Would Netlify forgive the bill if this didn't go viral? 2. How do you plan to address this issue so that it never happens again? Everyone here knew someone from Netlify would come and say OP wouldn't have to pay. That was a given. Now we want to know the important answers.

1. Yes. We've forgiven lots and lots of bills over the last 9 years and they haven't gone viral 2. While I've always favored erring towards keeping people's sites up we are currently working on changing the default behavior to never let free sites incur overages

Do the changes you are working on that will cause "the default behavior to never let free sites incur overages" involve providing users with spending limit controls?

Solving this only for the free site use case doesn't address the core problem that people are bringing up about a lack of spending limit controls.

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

#377

Netlify 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.

How does a 60 TB in a day peak for a site that previously never crossed the free tier threshhold not qualify as "attack pattern"?

This is a static site. To reach that sort of bandwidth out of nowhere you'd need to publish the blueprint for a teleportation machine

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

#378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are only two questions everyone have: 1. Would Netlify forgive the bill if this didn't go viral? 2. How do you plan to address this issue so that it never happens again? Everyone here knew someone from Netlify would come and say OP wouldn't have to pay. That was a given. Now we want to know the important answers.

1. Yes. We've forgiven lots and lots of bills over the last 9 years and they haven't gone viral 2. While I've always favored erring towards keeping people's sites up we are currently working on changing the default behavior to never let free sites incur overages

Any cloud platform should have a spend-stop amount built in.

i.e. if I know I average $10 a day, I should be able to put in a "If it hits $50, email me and take it offline".

Of course the opposite problem is then people setting that limit too low but since the user defines the limit that's on them not you.

This is one of the reasons I still in 2024 rent physical boxes and run the modern stuff on top of them directly, yes it costs me more per month but the price is hard capped.

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

#379
post #139
post #7

> 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.

>it shows how disconnected this is from their real bandwidth cost It's a value added service, they don't trade bandwidth as a commodity. Therefore unfair characterisation. Plus, if you dive deeper: Bandwidth doesn't cost anything because bandwidth is just about pulsing some light in some glass fiber and applying some minuscule voltage on some metal fiber.Okay, maybe it costs some amount of electricity but all this is…

> they don't trade bandwidth as a commodity

I really don't get your point. If you're a hosting provider, the very thing you're selling is bandwidth (and disk space). Everything else is a value added service.

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

#380
post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The problem is that it isn't entirely clear which ones have predictable cost to the non-lawyers eye. I.e. they should have to have sane defaults, like reasonable spending limits and opt-out, by regulation, since the market is failing here.
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