Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

old.reddit.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

651–660 of 836 posts

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

#651

Post by littlestymaar »

tsimionescu wrote: post #627
littlestymaar wrote: post #594

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But why are you talking about moving VMs?! Looks like you're adding tons of far-fetched speculations at every step of your reasoning. The way you easily deal with this issue is very simple and does not require moving VMs: you just allocate newly spawned VMs to existing hosts with available room! When you do so (and they obviously all do!) you end up with little unused hardware…

Say you have 3 hosts, each with a capacity of 10 VMs. At some point you have 28 running VMs - 10 on host1, 10 on host2, 8 on host3. Someone then closes down 2 of the VMs on host1, and 7 of the VMs on host3. Now you have 19 VMs running, but need to keep all 3 hosts powered. If you don't have live VM moving, you are now forced to keep Host3 running only because 1 VM is running on it, even if that VM is idle. So, this o…

Except you don't have 3 hosts but 3 thousands, and during the time you're stopping the 9 VMs somebody else is starting 5 or 15 new ones!

Yes it is similar to memory fragmentation in some way, but your argument is like saying an integer stored on the heap costs a full memory page! You realize that it's nonsense. Sure in extreme edge cases it can, but that's not a good metric to know the memory footprint of an integer!

Being able to move VMs is nice as it allows more host use, but it's doesn't mean hosts end up with single idle VMs often!

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

#652

Post by icelain »

lelanthran wrote: post #633
eric_cc wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Having a personal VPS is the way. I run a SvelteJS app as well as my personal website, blog and a couple other services on a $6 droplet and it runs great.

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

#653

Post by callalex »

tombolino wrote: post #492
Voultapher wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

no, they charge 6x according to that table. Because they are using aws

Netlify is not paying anywhere near the sticker price for AWS traffic.

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

#654

Post by Hot_Garbage »

canyonero wrote: post #518
herbst wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What price would the dude have to pay if he didn't publish it? How often does this happen and why is there no protection against charging free customers 100k out of the blue. Why charge it and shock the customer if practice is to waive it? The CEOs response kinda just made the situation worse.

Yeah, I don't buy this conspiracy theory. The reason why they charge it could be as simple as they calculated the bandwidth usage following a ddos attack. It amounted to 104k worth of bandwidth usage. There system is not sophisticated enough to recognize it was a mistake due to attack on their site. Thus a manual intervention was needed, and now it's resolved.

Right, but there's still a huge contradiction here. The support email says it's standard practice to charge 20%. Now the CEO's comment says it's standard practice to waive it entirely. So which one is true?

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

#655

Post by GirkovArpa »

nazka wrote: post #577
kej wrote: post #555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is something I really like about Nearly Free Speech.net. Their model is that you deposit funds up front, and they will deduct from those funds as you use services. It helps that they actually are nearly free so that a single $20 deposit can last for months or years in many cases. It's bizarre to me that more services don't support billing this way, since there are tons of situations where I would much rather hav…

Yes it’s nice like that. Specially for side projects on AWS that could go wrong on your personal credit card. Also I heard they forgave bills sometimes.

Yes. Back around 2020 they forgave me a $1000 bill for a side project I thought was running on a free tier.

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

#656

Post by AbraKdabra »

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.

How about a button that says "put down my website if it suddenly starts getting charged"?.

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

#657

Post by digging »

DANmode wrote: post #89
serial_dev wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It means that they will charge you 20k (a year's rent for me, no biggie) instead of 100k for your free website, or 5k if you got lucky.

If you value uptime, even through being massively attacked, they can offer you that.

Who on earth does this describe?

1. Comfortable paying >$100,000 to prevent their site going down for a single day, and

2. Doesn't pay a dime for their hosting service on a day-to-day basis

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

#658

Post by krab »

sanitycheck wrote: post #544
charles_f wrote: post #531

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1. Yes. We've forgiven lots and lots of bills over the last 9 years and they haven't gone viral Sequence of events doesn't support this answer: 1. User gets charged 100k 2. User complains to support 3. User receives discount to 20k, then 5k. Support states policy is normally 20k 4. User discloses to the world. Goes viral. 5. Invoice is forgiven While you might forgive "lots and lots", fact is that you still present…

Quite... It does seem that either the story we're getting isn't completely accurate or the support people who handled this need a little reminder of what's supposed to happen. I'm a paranoid person by nature so "It's free... just... give us your card details" is always suspicious.

The issue is that you don't have to give the credit card details in this case. That charge wouldn't probably have gone through anyway.

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

#659

Post by op00to »

kjs3 wrote: post #604
op00to wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it’s a tax dodge! “Forgive” 100k of “overages” which cost Netlify next to nothing, then report it as a write off on taxes.

That would potentially make this situation much, much worse (in the US tax system...YMMV). If Netfly forgives a business debt and reports it to the IRS as uncollectable so they can write it off, the IRS can consider all or part of the forgiven debt as income to the person who is forgiven (there are lots of details, IANATA/IANYTA, YMMV). I don't want a blindside 100k bill from my hobby site, but I sure as phuck don't…

Oh no I just got a 1099! Ha ha. That’s a really good point.

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

#660

Post by op00to »

phone8675309 wrote: post #598
pants2 wrote: post #538

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See the Robinhood user who committed suicide after misunderstanding his liabilities from selling options.

Honestly I'd probably commit suicide if a hosting provider gave me a $100K bill. Collect this from my corpse you scummy fucks.

Please don’t! We like you here.
Post reply on HN