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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

#631

Post by bigfudge »

throwawaaarrgh wrote: post #124
carlmr wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess we need regulation for this.

Or, rather than creating more regulations, people could read the contracts they agree to when they get service, and use a competitor if they don't like it

There is such a thing as an unfair contract. Moreover, there are business practices that can become a local maxima in an industry and squeeze out competition which would actually be a net benefit to most consumers. Mobile roaming was the same before the EU intervened, and were now going back to the shitshow tjat preceded it in the uk.

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

#632

Post by bigfudge »

tsimionescu wrote: post #164
jzebedee wrote: post #13

The most bizarre thing is that this is a known issue that folks have asked them for ways to mitigate, to no avail. The reddit thread even links to an extremely weird dialogue where Netlify's response boils down to, "if you're hosting a small site that gets DDoS'd, don't." https://answers.netlify.com/t/limit-bandwidth-to-avoid-high-...

To some extent, that answer is fair enough, assuming they make this clear up front. If their service is "we'll keep your site up no matter what, for a price" that's a fine service to offer. It's not what the vast majority of people want, of course. If their advertising is targeted to small businesses and individuals who could never afford this type of service, they could be guilty of false advertising, at least moral…

Their marketing is very much like this. It’s completely misleading. They are definitively not selling “keep it up at all costs, money no object”

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

#633

Post by lelanthran »

eric_cc wrote: post #451
valine wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve been a netlify user since 2017 and I just deleted all my sites. I can’t risk receiving a $100k bill for toy projects. Your “current policy” is not good enough.

Same. Toy project and it’s not worth the risk of using netlify. What’s a good, simple alternative for a VueJS app?

> What’s a good, simple alternative for a VueJS app?

I'm not sure about VueJS specifically, but I run everything I can off a $6/m digital ocean droplet (static sites, web apps, git repos, RDBMS, some other custom apps I've written) and it hasn't broken a sweat yet[1].

My understanding used to be that requests will be dropped if my virtual server can't handle it, and I'll have to transfer 10,000TB to get to a $100,000 bill.

In practice, my server will not physically handle the load to serve more than maybe $1000 of data a month; it will fall over before that.

In summary, using a VPS is sorta like an instant hard cap.

[1] Until I tried using Jenkins. Which crashed constantly because apparently 512GB of RAM is too little for what it does. I'm now in the process of writing my own little CD tool that isn't going to go over 30MB of RAM just to run my deployment scripts.

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

#634

Post by patmorgan23 »

raiyu wrote: post #418
noir_lord wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

We did this at DigitalOcean for similar reasons, wasn't a feature that was commonly used. Additionally, when you set that limit people then get upset because usually when they go over it for a good reason, like going viral, they aren't anticipating it, and just when their traffic is most valuable the site is down. What Netlify is doing here is really the best approach for both parties. And typically speaking a $104k…

They still need to make tweaks to avoid sending $100k bills to people who signed up to a free service.

Like let them go over one month and then make them sign up for a paid plan for the next.

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

#635

Post by ptdorf »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #440
herbst wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope this is not one of the cases that get simply forgotten and in a week or two their beginner unfriendly platform gets recommended again without a second thought. With models like this and AWS people will get afraid of success

I think fly/netlify/vercel/render etc. get a decent enough flak on here for costs and/or reliability. The average HNer seems to be recommending colocating your physical server :-)

This is the way.

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

#637

Post by herbst »

ryandrake wrote: post #603
herbst wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any cheap VPS and nginx should work for 99% of their customer base I guess. If you want easy deploy for static or dynamic just use git hooks.

I've run all of my hobby projects, including personal web pages, a Wordpress site that serves a local club, a small single-JS web app, and E-mail hosting for my family and a few other domains, on a single $5/mo VPS, and have never received a bill higher than $5 for the past, I don't know... 15 years. If your web site makes you money in proportion to the amount of views or bandwidth you use, by all means, go with a pr…

I don't get that either. I earn all my money from my websites and serve > 1mio requests daily all from a single Vultr instance for less than $150 including backups and more traffic than I ever need. With monitoring, CDN, DNS, ddos protection, and whatever I pay about $200 a month, no surprised and a lot of room to grow or get HN hugged, or whatever.

I've been on a $25 instance for years for all my sites, which worked as well.

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

#638

Post by ashconnor »

account42 wrote: post #434
ashconnor wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hetzner will just null route your server if you’re DDoS’d.

Which is vastly preferable to a thousand dollar bill (not to mention a hundred thousand dollar bill) for most websites.

Depends how good they are at detecting DDoS vs spike in legit traffic.

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

#639

Post by thingification »

People deploying low-traffic side projects - to VPSes or similar that allows price capping - and who do use a database: what deployment stack do you use these days?

I assume Docker + something is most popular, but what something? Does terraform work sanely for cheap virtual hosting? Ansible? I don't want to manually install any more stuff than the minimum I can get away with!

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

#640

Post by JasonSage »

bobfunk wrote: post #317

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.

I’ve already migrated my two sites off Netlify after reading about this incident, and seeing other replies where folks said they were stuck with large bills.

This large bill doesn’t look like a legitimate mistake, it looks like everything worked as intended until things got escalated via Hacker News.

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