671–680 of 836 posts
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.
Your support was going to charge him 5% as a "sign of good fate". How kind.
If it hadn't gotten traction, you absolutely would have charged him.
How many other people have you strong armed into paying ridiculous bills?
The fact that you have no usage limits is clear indication that this is intentionally left open to abuse.
Extremely shady and downright criminal.
In addition to all of that, the real moral of the story is to not use anything with dynamic billing for personal projects, even if there is a free tier. Always ensure that the free tier does not automatically turn into a paid tier.
That said, I've never used Netlify, so I don't know how they present this service at the time of signing up.
GitHub Pages is great for static sites, and included Jekyll build support is a bonus.
This line scares me so much, the fact that we have to rely on an external forum to sort things out. What if my HN post doesn’t gain any attention? Is that it for me?
I understand that someone would pull all their strings in hope for solution but still, companies should be available directly.
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> 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 Of course. And that’s why any limit against a dynamic variable should also have alerts linked to it Send an alert to the user when traffic starts spiking, especially if a simple projection shows it’s going to go over their limit Then the user is aware, hopefull…
That's a level of responsiveness that doesn't exist for the vast majority of organizations. If your customer is aware enough to notice they are being hit with a DOS or legit traffic while it is happening, then great! They can respond, and if needed, engage proserve to get support for scaling or defense depending on needs. If your customer is not alert enough, then their site is offline, and they won't hear about it u…
I'd say the same about those who only think in absolutes.
That's a false dilemma. You can give your customers a choice in these matters with an optional hard limit, which I realize seems like a rather extreme idea these days.
Someone running a personal project will likely opt to have a low hard limit, say $10, while businesses will more likely opt in for alerts without, or with very high hard limits.
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If it’s really pure static, github is great because it’s impossible for you to be billed. If you want some functions, Cloudflare free plan is nice because you can configure it to stop operating when the usage limit is reached, or pay $5 a month for more than you’ll likely ever need for a hobby project. Also bandwidth is free.
Do you need to configure Cloudflare to stop operating on limit? I was thinking they never charge for anything unless you explicitly allowed it.
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If you value uptime, even through being massively attacked, they can offer you that.
It's a static website. Plenty can offer uptime through being massively attacked, for free.
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!
I don't use docker for my projects, as I deploy on RHEL like systems which I'm intimately familiar how to configure (and have snippets I mix and match).
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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
Honestly, this terrifies me---I run a bunch of different sites off netlify, and I would have never imagined that a site could jump from 0 to six figures of bills a month without something hitting a tripwire somewhere and cutting it off or at least communicating with the account owner. At least users should have the capacity to self-impose bandwidth caps to prevent this sort of thing.