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I got pwned by my cloud costs

troyhunt.com

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Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#501

Post by brianwawok »

jpgvm wrote: post #450
_xnmw wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand, what is the advantage of Cloudflare over Fastly or Akamai if caching is not your biggest priority? Does Cloudflare have better DDoS protection, or something else?

Yes among other things. Also edge compute, etc. Fastly comes close on a lot of fronts (and does better at a few things) but unless you are godlike with Varnish scripting it's a lot harder to make it do what you want than Cloudflare.

OPs use case is a couple giant zip files. Edge compute is real cool, but not something a lot of people need when they think of CDN.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#502

Post by pdimitar »

jollybean wrote: post #428
pdimitar wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haven't even heard of DataPacket, thanks for the link! And yeah I agree about the "some services are super low cost so you get hooked" thing. Always been my impression of Amazon: they look for what they can apply scale savings on (usually object storage, it seems) and make it cheap and then over-charge for almost everything else.

That's not really it. The funny business in Amazon's pricing is their Egress Bandwidth, everything is rational. You're looking at the pricing from a 'cost plus' perspective which is not generally how things are priced. AWS core use case is IT departments being able to offload all of their infra. It's a massive, massive advantage. It's so, so much easier and more flexible to use AWS that there is no comparison. It's a…

I mean OK but I've been in big corps and they end up hiring a ton of DevOps that basically specialize in AWS.

Is that still cheaper? When you have 30+ very well-paid dedicated DevOps specialists? Maybe it is, I am just skeptical while looking at it as an outsider and without solid data.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#503

Post by ghaff »

godot wrote: post #491

These stories almost always boil down to this fundamental conflict of what you want for a personal project vs a business. (though in this case yes, Troy Hunt's HIBP is larger than a lot of startup businesses) In a business setting, you want your service to stay up, at the cost of spike in costs if accidents or mistakes happen. In a personal project, you want there to be hard limit on cost, and your service to go down…

Certainly the cloud providers probably make money by not having hard limits.

But it's also the case that if they did implement hard limits of some sort, you'd be reading blog posts about how AWS destroyed my project just when it was going big because someone stuck a circuit breaker foot gun in some corner and everything stopped working properly when usage spiked.

I do think there should probably be a hard circuit breaker. It should be simple and therefore inflexible. And it should come with a big warning sign. Still people will get burned because someone will set it, a project grows, and one day it goes off.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#504

Post by Sebb767 »

nostrebored wrote: post #380
XCSme wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Azure|Amazon > Hetzner|Linode > Cloudflare Why not directly Hetzner|Linode > Cloudflare?

So that you incur as much downtime risk as possible, obviously. I hate these 'cloud economics' optimizations that people tend to try.

There's a clear trade-off between downtime risk and cost explosion risk. For a hobby/non-profit project, risking the downtime to possibly save 7k€ plus surely saving the surcharge of "scalability" is definitely worth it.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#505

Post by dylan604 »

chasd00 wrote: post #464
7steps2much wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a difference between freelancers/one person companies and big cooperations though. Honestly, the question you need to ask in regards to cloud is a relatively simple one: Can I hire a sysadmin for cheaper than using the cloud? The answer to that, once you start using enough resources, is more often than not yes. Sure, it takes a while to get to that point, but eventually you will reach break even and it would…

even worse, i bet a lot are in the situation of "i have cloud AND i need to hire a system administrator".

this is something easily left out of discussions. it doesn't matter if the equipment is in the cloud or on-prem. someone still needs to be able to manage it all. whether they phsically install new hardware or push a button on a UI to bring up a new machine, it is still needed to be done and managed.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#506

Post by edub »

klohto wrote: post #494
edub wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're going to have an intermediary proxy that you run, for AWS perhaps use Lightsail. It is price competitive, and includes more bandwidth than Linode/DigitalOcean/Vultr for the price.

You are not allowed to use Lightsail once you use more professional services on AWS atleast per ToS

Interesting. In this example where the parent comment discusses using a proxy from AWS to Linode/Hetzner to Cloudflare, then I'd go with someone in the Bandwidth Alliance, which would include Linode and Vultr.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#507

Post by metalliqaz »

ghaff wrote: post #503
godot wrote: post #491

These stories almost always boil down to this fundamental conflict of what you want for a personal project vs a business. (though in this case yes, Troy Hunt's HIBP is larger than a lot of startup businesses) In a business setting, you want your service to stay up, at the cost of spike in costs if accidents or mistakes happen. In a personal project, you want there to be hard limit on cost, and your service to go down…

Certainly the cloud providers probably make money by not having hard limits. But it's also the case that if they did implement hard limits of some sort, you'd be reading blog posts about how AWS destroyed my project just when it was going big because someone stuck a circuit breaker foot gun in some corner and everything stopped working properly when usage spiked. I do think there should probably be a hard circuit bre…

But... they do implement limits.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#508

Post by closeparen »

lpcvoid wrote: post #76
closeparen wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps for the same reason that the vast majority of the readers of this site don’t use Hetzner: they are not European and neither are their users.

Hetzner is just an example - you can get cheap dedicated boxes with gigabit uplinks all over the world. And in this example it's not even important what latency the server has, since it was only feeding Cloudflares CDN with data.

Can you? I have not actually been able to identify a cheap, reputable dedicated server provider in the US. Ten years ago there were a few.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#509

Post by temp8964 »

godot wrote: post #491

These stories almost always boil down to this fundamental conflict of what you want for a personal project vs a business. (though in this case yes, Troy Hunt's HIBP is larger than a lot of startup businesses) In a business setting, you want your service to stay up, at the cost of spike in costs if accidents or mistakes happen. In a personal project, you want there to be hard limit on cost, and your service to go down…

Is it really that black and white? I think there is a continuum in hosting service. Not just A) very low end VPS, and B) unlimited cloud.

The fact is that there are low end VPS, middle end VPS, high end VPS, and dedicated servers. If you started from a low end VPS, it is very easy to gradually upgrade your VPS.

A $5/month VPS can be used to play for tons of things. I just don't get people who use free tier cloud, unless you just want to learn about the cloud hosting per se.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#510

Post by mdoms »

NicoJuicy wrote: post #247
Grollicus wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any substance to your allegation of Microsoft hiding behind their pricing model? This is very straight forward from their view, before: almost no traffic = almost no costs, now: huge traffic = $$$. On the other hand, it doesn't seem that Troy did try to talk to them about this and seems to want to eat the costs himself. As it was his mistake. I think that's commendable. I also think with the amount of fre…

He's an Azure MVP. He already has 13 k in credits/yr, which could absorb the costs ( just guessing here)

He's also independently very wealthy. Dude drives a GT-R and AMG C-Class (as at 2017, probably upgraded by now). He got a generous payout when he was laid off from Pfizer.
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