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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

#71

Post by Yodel0914 »

whatever1 wrote: post #43
lopkeny12ko wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For less than 1% of OP's monthly bill, you can build or obtain a more-than-enough server, drop your static files on it, and serve through nginx. And you get to keep it forever; there's no monthly subscription fee! Seriously, maybe I'm just old, but I look at the pricing of these hip and modern SaaS products for dead simple software and I cannot believe my eyes. The "old fashioned way" works just fine (and has always…

But you need a static IP, stable internet, UPS, and permission from your wife to have a 24/7 powered noisy box in a room

I pay less than $5/mth for a VPS with static IP and 1GB/mth transfer. If I get close to any of my CPU/Memory/Disk/Transfer capacity I get a friendly email letting me know that I might want to add more capacity.

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

#72

Post by klaustopher »

littlecranky67 wrote: post #60
dhaavi wrote: post #7

> And since my amount is too large, they offer to discount to 5%, which means I still need to pay 5 thousand dollars. If they just reduce to 5% like that, it shows how disconnected this is from their real bandwidth cost. Really does feel like a scam.

Especially since they admit it was a DDoS attack. What I find outrageous is first that they charge for incomming traffic (which is often free with other providers), but also 55$ per 100GB. For comparisson, Hetzner charges you 1€ per 1TB of outgoing traffic while incoming is free.

If the attacker downloaded the 3,44mb audio file that OP mentioned, aren't we talking about outgoing traffic?

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

#73

Post by hnlmorg »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #61
rafram wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, I wouldn’t say that’s necessarily the case. AWS support, for example, tends to be really good about waiving charges for things that are clearly your mistake, like an unused instance that you forgot to turn off for a couple months. That’s not because hosting instances doesn’t actually cost Amazon anything! It’s because they want to keep you as a customer even if it loses them a bit of money right now. In the Netli…

Our AWS TAM says they don’t do this anymore, and we spend tens of millions of dollars with them annually. n=1, ymmv

You presumably already have enterprise pricing discounts agreed though?

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

#74

Post by ji_zai »

This is my worst nightmare as a bootstrapped founder. And that there's no way to put a limit on spend is ridiculous. Someone that doesn't want me to do well can simply ddos me into bankruptcy out of nowhere.

Just went through Vercel's docs:

---

"Vercel helps to mitigate against L3 and L4 DDoS attacks at the platform level. Usage will be incurred for requests that are successfully served prior to us automatically mitigating the event. Mitigation usually takes place within one minute.

Usage will be incurred for requests that are not recognized as a DDoS event, such as bot and crawler traffic.

You should monitor your usage and utilize Edge Middleware to protect against undesired traffic based on its IP, User-Agent header value, or other identifiers."

---

That doesn't help me sleep well.

I feel that by now, these hosting providers should simply adopt best ddos protection practices and take responsibility for failure to protect.

"You should monitor your usage and utilize Edge Middleware to protect against undesired traffic based on its IP" - there should be some really good defaults for this right?

Clearly it's possible - Cloudflare's ddos protection is worded more strongly.

I'm willing to pay more for the service for peace of mind. Like, even $10/mo more to insure against getting smacked out of nowhere.

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

#75

Post by iforgotpassword »

gullevek wrote: post #27
isoprophlex wrote: post #14

There's no way in hell anyone should ever under any circumstance use a free service that might, for reasons entirely outside your control, suddenly bill you 5k, or 104k... or any non trivial amount really. Just suspend service on excessive overages...

Like in the past, when you went over your limit your page went offline. The good old Slashdot effect

Yeah Like wtf is wrong with that? Are people just to lazy to check what the conditions are when exceeding traffic? I'd never ever sign up for anything that just keeps charging...!?

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

#77

Post by factorialboy »

nindalf wrote: post #44

Since the author has gone viral I expect some netlify exec is going to take over and write this bill off to $0. In the words of Kramer “these big companies, they just write it off!” A moment of silence for the people who got DDoS-ed, didn’t go viral and still had to pay $5k.

You don't even know what a write-off is.

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

#78

Post by toomuchtodo »

hnlmorg wrote: post #73
toomuchtodo wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our AWS TAM says they don’t do this anymore, and we spend tens of millions of dollars with them annually. n=1, ymmv

You presumably already have enterprise pricing discounts agreed though?

Yes, but nothing novel, and this is a recent development (within the last few weeks).

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

#79

Post by geek_at »

ehsankia wrote: post #35
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-...

in other words, "if you're thinking of using netlify, don't".

true. I have a 9€/mo vps at Contabo for my blog and once boasted on HN that my small VPS is able to handle reddit/hn hugs which one user seemed to take personally and they started a DDOS against my VPS.

I only realized this after Contabo contacted me and said the traffic is so high that other clients service is also degraded and they will have to take my VPS down if its much longer (which was understandable). Gladly the ddos stopped soon.

But never was there any talk about any cost, they were very supportive

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

#80

Post by batmansmk »

LiamPowell wrote: post #12

I don't see why people are surprised by this or why people are calling it a scam. Netlify and others are extremely transparent about the fact that there are no limits. I completely understand not liking it and can see why the lack of limits would make it a bad option for plenty of people, but I don't see how it can possibly be called a scam.

I looked up the definition of scam and the goal is to make money out of the naivety of the victim. It involves a crisis, the illusion of shared exposure to a risk.

The price of cdn bandwidth is about 0.01/gb on low volume (cloudflare, aws, azure…) so op should be billed around $500 with 40TB. Netlify probably buys this for way less. He was presented a bill at $104k, « generously » reduced to $5k, still a x10 margin. Vercel and Netlify are outrageously expensive for what they do.

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