Comment by dhaavi
1 year ago
> 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?
Even so, on Hetzner it would have cost them a total of $164, with no discount. On Netlify it's over 500 times higher, apparently.
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.
It wouldn’t be possible for them. Netlify doesn’t own transit, so AWS needs to get their fat cut even if Netlify waives their fatter cut.
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.
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 Netlify case, though, insisting that this person still pay 5% is downright insulting. I’m sure they’re taking a hit already - just waive the whole thing.
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.
This is an admission that their UX sucks and makes it hard to know what state your account is in and what you're paying for. They waive the fees because a few high profile cases of people paying thousands due to the AWS console being awful would drive a lot of customers away.
I would say it is a scam, because you can't set a budget limit.
Stunning
Our AWS TAM says they don’t do this anymore, and we spend tens of millions of dollars with them annually. n=1, ymmv
Nowadays for customers spending millions of dollars you'd expect (at least, Amazon would expect) that the customer has a FinOps department who are already working on getting the most 'bang for their buck' out of what they're paying for and minimising their spend, and they would jump to another platform in a heartbeat if they thought they could save money. It's not unreasonable to think that you don't need to do these customers any favours to keep their business, because those customers are big enough to look after themselves.
For smaller customers, the friendliness of customer support and the flexibility to help them if they make mistakes is much more likely to be a retention consideration. And who knows when a company spending 3 digits a month becomes a customer spending 6 digits a month? You want to be the provider of choice in case the company grows.
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You presumably already have enterprise pricing discounts agreed though?
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That’s not because hosting instances doesn’t actually cost Amazon anything
Except it doesn't cost them anything. The marginal cost of keeping your single instance running is $0 (unless they were 100% out of capacity and they could have sold that instance to someone else either at full price or spot price)
Electricity costs money
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“There is a good chance it costs them $0” = “in expectation it costs them >$0”
This exactly.
Some quick back of napkin math says 190TB would cost about $12k in AWS cloudfront costs.
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?
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>it shows how disconnected this is from their real bandwidth cost
It's a value added service, they don't trade bandwidth as a commodity. Therefore unfair characterisation.
Plus, if you dive deeper: Bandwidth doesn't cost anything because bandwidth is just about pulsing some light in some glass fiber and applying some minuscule voltage on some metal fiber.Okay, maybe it costs some amount of electricity but all this is just a business model for paying on capital expenditure through time share arrangements. People can have all kind of models for this, for example you can come together with others or pay it all by yourself to install the equipment and have free bandwidth for the lifetime of the equipment.
It's all just arrangements to cover the capital investment and earn something on top of it. That's not a scam. A scam would be if they didn't account correctly for the timeshare usage or induce usage to boost payments.
> they don't trade bandwidth as a commodity
I really don't get your point. If you're a hosting provider, the very thing you're selling is bandwidth (and disk space). Everything else is a value added service.
I disagree, they are not a colocation service that happens to rent servers. They are opinionated platform for deploying web applications in a specific way. The bandwidth happens to be a necessity to do that and also a useful metric for billing by usage.