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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

#811

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Why go through that effort when they could just lie about site usage and say you incurred a bunch of traffic? Or make fake site "hits" from localhost? It's really the trade-off for using any cloud host. You are implicitly trusting the host, their monitoring tools, their billing system, and their customer support when things go wrong

Both of those could be exposed via an audit or a whistleblower, either of which would destroy the company and its reputation overnight.

As opposed to just negligently allowing it from the outside?

Netlify still looks terrible here.

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

#812
post #806
post #752

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weird. The cheapest T-Mobile non-prepaid plan I see is $50 + taxes and fees, and that is without watch service. The cheapest T-Mobile prepaid I see is $30 + taxes and fees, and that also is without a watch. I pay $20 for the phone plan, and $10 for the watch add-on. No fees or taxes Feels reasonable to me.

What's a watch add-on?

Cell service for an Apple Watch so you do not need to carry your phone.

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

#813
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?

Why would one ever want to add a watch to a phone bill? ISPs are notoriously fleecing their costumers on every front, why would you ever go to them to get a loan?

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

#814

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> There are 100s of AWS services and many where you can't just apply a sensible rejection policy once you hit that hard limit without doing something the user cannot recover from. It's only not hard because you aren't actually thinking about the matrix of AWS products that exist and how they are billed. I don't think you understand what a hard limit is. When I set a hard limit, that means that under no circumstance s…

> If you set your hard limit to $20, then Amazon should refuse to create more than 50 secrets. That's a safe behavior which limits your spend to at most $20. I have 100 secrets and no hard limit. Now I set the hard limit to $20. What does AWS do?

Refuses to set that hard limit until you delete some secrets first.

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

#815

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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...!?

But then where would you run a small hobby project that you'd like to run in the cloud? I have some small stuff I'm running on Google Cloud Platform, and honestly I'm scared of the same thing happening to me because there's no easy way to set a limit. But AWS and Azure have the same policy. (In my case, I'm looking for somewhere I can easily deploy a set of ~5 Docker containers, they don't need to scale up, and it's…

Just get a standard normal VPS from Hetzner or something, you don't need crap like GCS.

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

#816
post #715
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.

It's impractical because residential internet speed is very asymmetrical and behind NAT. You will still need external service to get around the NAT thing and the fact you don't have a static IP.

Only some ISPs are like that

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

#817

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I use BunnyCDN to host several sites, they have a minimum cost of $1 per month and I usually pay $1 per month. I run my sites [0] on Hugo and copy the generated sites (Makefile) to BunnyCDN with their command line tool. It's a plain CDN, but does include DNS hosting for easy SSL certificates and has scriptable DNS [1] where you can run Javascript for dynamic DNS. I went with them b/c they are in the EU, but I've stay…

I switched from Bunny to BlazingCDN, with same performance... 1000TB - $0.0025 per Gb And the support helps a lot, they even made the config for Asia for free https://blazingcdn.com/pricing/

Can't use BlazingCDN because of GDPR.

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

#818
post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Also, that's the benefits of credit cards - that you can still issue a charge back, and credit card companies very much favor the consumer rather than the merchant. So your suggestion is to issue a chargeback.. to get money back that should under the terms of whatever service you signed up for be owed?. That seems like bordering on fraud tbh. > Additionally, when you set that limit people then get upset because usu…

So is the solution to have two thresholds? Notify me urgently if the traffic exceeds 100$, giving me a chance to evaluate what's going on but shut it down at 1000$ if I don't act.

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

#819
post #555

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,…

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…

I absolutely love NFS and pay for the support option even though I don’t need it, simply to support them. Everything about that service is simply ace.

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

#820
post #580

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FYI: From my experience, if you do more the 20-25TB, you can get 75% off no questions asked.

If you’re regularly a large customer like that, seems like just moving to AWS directly would make the most sense right?

At that scale, probably. Especially since AWS would offer you discounts over their public prices too. Netlify et al probably stop making sense when they cost more than a few engineering hours and the cost of AWS, Azure or GCP
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