Live data from Hacker News

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

old.reddit.com

761–770 of 836 posts

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

#761
post #371
post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This may seem weird, but I believe ToS ae the real problem here. I call it the "car rental" problem. When I rent a car in person, I am often given a contract. And this contract is filled with tiny print, and pages of it. There are often people behind you, waiting, and bored/annoyed people behind the counter, waiting. This is beyond unreasonable. A point of sale contract should be short, in readable text, and understa…

> When I rent a car in person, I am often given a contract. And this contract is filled with tiny print, and pages of it. As someone who reads the agreements I sign, one thing that has become prevalent is that they're so used to people not paying attention to what they're signing that they're sometimes not even giving you an accurate copy to review. For example, you read the thing and think, "Okay, I can work within…

Yup. And that's the part that needs to end. The angry part.

I have seen people understanding, but with a "oh, you're one of those people" looks on their face. That too is entirely uncouth. But people should start recording these interactions, not obtrusively as the purpose is not to intimidate, but instead just make a record of what transpires.

I think legislation that makes it completely legal and admissible in court, any recorded retail interaction, might be an interesting change.

Because if you are presented with a contract and "JUST SIGN THE DAMN THING!", or "It just means $x", or "People are waiting, just sign it!" and so on, that would likely go a long way indicate compulsion, or even (by describing intent) change the entire contract itself.

If this happens, it may be cheaper to just have sane contracts, and do non-dumb things, then try to train every employee that has public contact.

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

#762
post #753

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My phone bill is 10€. I get unlimited calls and text, 100Gb 4G/5G then unlimited 3g, in France. I could also get 50 MB data, 2h calls, unlimited texts for 2€.

How much to add a watch to the plan?

Or a car? Man these are cellphone contracts not consumer credits. US folks ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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

#764

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I agree with both of your philosophies and also run a VPS. However, lots of people would have no idea how to manage a server from scratch or to install a web server, even a static one. Netlify really is pretty amazingly simple for what it offers, which is a lot. And even among those who think they can run a server, many probably have wide open security holes they are oblivious to.

> And even among those who think they can run a server, many probably have wide open security holes they are oblivious to.

This is the big thing, but I also think that modern out-the-box OSes are pretty damn secure these days.

IOW, the amount of knowledge and time needed to maintain my single VPS is a lot less than the knowledge and time you will need to manage your costs using multiple hosted SaaS suppliers for static hosting, web-app hosting, database hosting, repo hosting, etc.

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

#766
post #159

Hosting personal sites on cheap hardware at home makes even more sense to me after reading this horror story. Why do not more technically inclined people self-host? Is it force of habit from how things are done at work? I would much rather run the "risk" of some occasional dowtime, than keeping the lights on at all costs under a DDoS-attack.

Why not go for GitHub hosting then?

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

#767
post #520

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.

One additional feedback, for consideration: to me, your Pricing page[1] doesn’t make it sufficiently clear that the “Starter” plan may incur costs at all (let alone in this ballpark). It’s now more apparent when looking at it in hindsight, but you have to either read very carefully, or go to the separate “View Features” page to understand this. “0$ to get started, then pay as you go” reads to me: “0$ to get started,…

That was my understanding as well, since I signed up for MetLife years ago up until this very moment.

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

#768
post #588

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you run on a single EC2 instance and you aren’t running an auto scaling cluster or anything of the sort, it would be pretty hard to get a huge bill. I much prefer that and the chance that it goes down then autoscaling or severless. Most serverless solutions have also gotten so config heavy or complex to make changes that most projects feel much better to me on an instance I can ssh into and poke around without hav…

Thanks, I use a "small" EC2 instance for my personal stuff (about $35 a month), with the Cloudflare free version, but I honestly don't know and what would happen if something went viral or a DOS. Would the bill be double? Triple? Would the site simply crash. What does Cloudflare do? I honestly have no idea.

Site would just not run if you're using EC2 directly and the machine can't handle it. Not sure what cloudflare does, i don't use it, just AWS directly :)

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

#769
post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Use a token bucket on your web server to catch abusive IPs and then blackhole them using `iptables -t raw -I PREROUTING -s ip -j DROP`. I know. I run https://ipv4.games/ which invites hackers to unleash their botnets, and the service runs on a small VM with only a few cores. It's been attacked by botnets with 49,131,669 IP addresses. There's no Cloudflare frontend or anything like that, because back when I used Cloud…

This strategy may work for a (D)DoS that is targeted to an application layer, but won't work if the attack is designed to exhaust your bandwidth. Once you're receiving more traffic than you network cards can handle, it does not matter if you'll drop the packets with iptables or not. I was the target of attacks that caused Hetzner to terminate my contract. I was leasing physical servers there, so I assume the attacks…

I rent a GCE VM and there's not many if any people out there who can exhaust Google's network infrastructure. The only thing I have to worry about is making sure my server doesn't respond to abusive traffic.

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

#770
post #711
post #699

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 0$ to get started, then pay as you go” reads to me: “0$ to get started, and then you can order add-ons and extra features as you need them I think I disagree with this, but maybe I'm misunderstanding you. Pay as you go sounds strongly to me that you pay based on your actual usage, not that it's free except for add-ons. A pay as you go phone, for example, does not imply you need to buy a telephony add-on, an SMS add…

> you pay based on your actual usage The disagreement is on what "usage" means. I wouldn't assume that "usage" includes things that don't take any action on my part. If I don't use my phone, for example, I wouldn't get any "usage". A phone pay-as-you-go plan would probably trigger similar outrage if they charged you potentially unlimited amounts for phone calls that hit your voicemail overnight.

Do you know how web hosting works? You pay for a service so other people can use it. Extending the phone analogy, it is like you set up a public phone that anyone can use, and you pay for every time someone uses it.
Post reply on HN