Comment by isoprophlex
1 year ago
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...
Yeah. Elsewhere in these comments there's a link to a support thread[0] where Netlify support essentially says you shouldn't ever need an option to suspend your site at a certain point because:
#1. If you think there's any chance of getting DDoSd, you should already be on a business plan instead of a starter tier.
#2. If you think there's any chance of your site going viral, you're going to want to pay the cost anyway to let all those people visit.
I agree that's ridiculous and that the lack of any option of capping costs would mean I'd never sign up for the service. But that's the official response, for what its worth.
[0] https://answers.netlify.com/t/limit-bandwidth-to-avoid-high-...
So anyone whos site might be posted to HN should be on a business plan.
I'd think Hacker News actually comes under #2. If 100,000 people come from Hacker News to look at your hobby site about the Aamber Pegasus, you're supposed to think of how you've improved their lives by letting them read about it.
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...!?
too lazy is a bit uncharitable. These terms tend to be buried 8pt font disclaimer text and esoteric metering matrixes.
meanwhile in size 72 font on the marketing page it says FREE STATIC SITE HOSTING!
that's why this thread is more or less condemning scammy business practices.
[edit] check out this forum explanation from render.com billing:
> Free Tier Services are suspended, no overage charges. Paid Tier Services are unaffected (Free Tier Services can be upgraded to a Paid Tier, this isn’t an overage because you are manually intervening.) Exceeding allotted Bandwidth does result in automatic overage charges. $30 for additional 100 GB blocks. Exceeding Pipeline Minutes results in deployments failing and no overage charges by default, you can configure whether you want to allow overage charges for additional blocks of Pipeline Minutes.
I still don't understand, free tiers are suspended so no overage charges, but then how can they exceed bandwidth of which we're liable? x_X
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People don't check for every possible thing that can go wrong, otherwise we wouldn't have time to do anything. I remember when I got charged a "cancelling fee" for cancelling my Adobe subscription that accidentally went past its free trial. The situation was so ludicrous that I had never imagined that they would charge something like 6 months worth of subs me to cancel a monthly subscription. In the end I got out of it and paid nothing but I have absolutely hated Adobe ever since.
These things are scams because they prey on the fact that they're the only one shitty enough to do something so shitty and are counting on you not realising just how shitty they are.
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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 a hobby project so I'd like to keep costs as low as possible.)
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first of all these cloud services are designed especially for that, for autoscaling. Second of all, if these are hobby projects we cannot look every hour the costs etc unlike people who's that their job. So stop calling people lazy and pretend like you are better than others because you are not.
I understand that some businesses might want to take the hit from a cost surge because they get an even higher revenue surge. But a large fraction of sites aren't like that and would prefer a loss of service to a cost overrun. Service providers should always offer a "maximum out-of-pocket cost" service option. Those that don't aren't suitable vendors for most customers and customers should be warned about them.
I believe that's what Firebase Hosting does.
As I recall, you have to actively sign up for the paid plan (Blaze) to get pay-as-you-go billing. Otherwise, you get free quota, and if it's up, it's up.
I think it also integrates into all of Google Cloud's billing management stuff, but I've never had to bother with that.
> use a free service that might, for reasons entirely outside your control, suddenly bill you 5k, or 104k... or any non trivial amount really.
Like all of the big clouds with free tiers and nuke it from orbit level footguns lying about everywhere?
Use a virtual card with just a small amount of money on it to limit your liability. Won't work if you've entered a contract, but for a lot of these providers, including AWS it works.
This "one crazy trick" does nothing to limit your true liability.
If you go to a restaurant someone at your table orders 5,000 plates of mozzarella sticks, the fact that your credit card only covers $5 doesn't mean you are magically absolved from the rest of the bill.
For $100k, a debt collection firm would be more than happy to get a judgement against you. Credit card or no.
Totally agree, it's an unacceptable risk