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I got pwned by my cloud costs

troyhunt.com

61–70 of 657 posts

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#61
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would go as far as saying that the hosting for such a service should be entirely sponsored by Microsoft.

He's a "Microsoft Regional Director and MVP" so Microsoft pays the bill one way or another. I expect that he has reduced Azure rates as well.

Regional Directors and MVPs aren't employed by Microsoft: https://rd.microsoft.com/en-us/about/

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#62
post #14
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every cloud makes this mistake easy! You have to manually activate billing alerts for everyone because they want you to spend more snd more each month. I am still waiting for a cloud without these dark patterns. But that will never happen because it‘s leaving a big amount of money on the table by not being hostile.

Get a VPS from linode for $5 a month and it costs $5 a month.

Not really as there is network traffic quota:

If you use up your monthly network transfer pool, you can continue to use your Linodes normally. That being said, you will be charged $0.01 for each additional GB at the end of your billing cycle.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#63
post #41

As soon as I saw "17GB file" i thought "that's what torrents are for". Otherwise one mistake and... Well this happens. Or someone maliciously bypasses CF cache e.g. by parameters. Cloud just is not suitable for any kind of volume egress. It's a death trap. Like going on vacation with data roaming enabled.

Yeah, HIBP is using torrents:

> I removed the direct download links from the HIBP website and just left the torrents which had plenty of seeds so it was still easy to get the data. Since then, Cloudflare upped that 15GB limit and I've restored the links for folks that aren't in a position to pull down a torrent. Crisis over.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#64
post #56

Can somebody explain to me why I wouldn't just rent a 40 EUR dedicated server from Hetzner with unlimited traffic and gigabit uplink? His 600GB/day is way less than what you get over a gigabit link within a day. Sure, sudden bursts would perhaps "throttle" at a gigabit, but according to his article that was only the cloudflare proxy anyhow, so no pain in having that take a few seconds longer. As far as I am concerned…

He is a Microsoft MVP. A title that is given for being a "community evangelist" of Microsoft. You wouldn't get that throwing it on a Heztner machine.

Edit: Consider this article, and Geoff's statement about Azure credits.

https://www.theregister.com/2021/04/21/microsoft_revokes_mvp...

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#65
post #6

Ouch. If Troy Hunt of all people can make this mistake, it can happen to anybody. HIBP is an awesome service funded totally by donations, so it's too bad this happened. Of course Microsoft is happy to hide behind their confusing pricing model and let customers overpay for Azure without alerting them.

Every cloud makes this mistake easy! You have to manually activate billing alerts for everyone because they want you to spend more snd more each month. I am still waiting for a cloud without these dark patterns. But that will never happen because it‘s leaving a big amount of money on the table by not being hostile.

> I am still waiting for a cloud without these dark patterns.

This is how mobile and landline phone companies made enormous fortunes before flat rate billing. It’s called post-paid vs pre-paid billing.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#66
post #56

Can somebody explain to me why I wouldn't just rent a 40 EUR dedicated server from Hetzner with unlimited traffic and gigabit uplink? His 600GB/day is way less than what you get over a gigabit link within a day. Sure, sudden bursts would perhaps "throttle" at a gigabit, but according to his article that was only the cloudflare proxy anyhow, so no pain in having that take a few seconds longer. As far as I am concerned…

I'm fan of cheap VPSes too, but I'd like to have things like metrics out of the box

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#67
It is very good these things are getting publicized. More and more people realize these payment schemes for what they are: a scam. Every cloud provider that refuse to put a hard spending limit participates in this.

It is important to remember that not all cloud providers participate in it. For example, in Hetzner Cloud, they explicitly provide the maximum amount you are going to pay for a given instance or service in a given month. You are guaranteed not to pay more. Everybody knows why Amazon etc. refuses to do it this way.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#68
post #6

Ouch. If Troy Hunt of all people can make this mistake, it can happen to anybody. HIBP is an awesome service funded totally by donations, so it's too bad this happened. Of course Microsoft is happy to hide behind their confusing pricing model and let customers overpay for Azure without alerting them.

Every cloud makes this mistake easy! You have to manually activate billing alerts for everyone because they want you to spend more snd more each month. I am still waiting for a cloud without these dark patterns. But that will never happen because it‘s leaving a big amount of money on the table by not being hostile.

Dark patterns - this sounds like a colour scheme you don't care for.

"Predatory death-trap pricing" captures the spirit of the thing with rather more clarity. It is wholly intentional after all.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#69
post #56

Can somebody explain to me why I wouldn't just rent a 40 EUR dedicated server from Hetzner with unlimited traffic and gigabit uplink? His 600GB/day is way less than what you get over a gigabit link within a day. Sure, sudden bursts would perhaps "throttle" at a gigabit, but according to his article that was only the cloudflare proxy anyhow, so no pain in having that take a few seconds longer. As far as I am concerned…

He is a Microsoft MVP. A title that is given for being a "community evangelist" of Microsoft. You wouldn't get that throwing it on a Heztner machine. Edit: Consider this article, and Geoff's statement about Azure credits. https://www.theregister.com/2021/04/21/microsoft_revokes_mvp...

Sounds like a pretty expensive privilege.

How is using cloudflare okay in this then? Cloudflare is also not Azure

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#70
post #18

Interestingly, Troy says that egress is expensive on Azure at $0.014 AUD/gB (~$0.010 USD/gB), but that is the same price as additional egress for Linode and DO, and Linode egress has never struck me as expensive. In fact, I’m kind of shocked (as an AWS user) that Azure egress is the same price as Linode. Actually, wow it seems AWS is also the same price as Linode and DO for egress. While Linodes and DO do come with d…

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