Comment by injuly
1 year ago
I'm hesitant to use "fancy" cloud service/hosting providers for reasons like this.
I don't understand why they won't just raise a 503 if the traffic exceeds the spend limit, or at the very least provide that as an option.
Playing ”devil’s” advocate: tracking spend in real-time is not trivial. It adds complexity to stack. Bugs in the feature can cause sites to go down (for long time) without a reason. Larger online businesses likely rather sort out the problems later than risk shutting down in the middle of unexpected success.
(But I also would like to see this feature)
Vercel will happily tell you how much you are spending in pretty much realtime as it sails past your budget
OP is right though, realtime alerting is non-trivial to build. It looks us a lot of work at Vercel to get right. We also offer budgeting options where you can set spend limits now, too.
1 reply →
Not really. AWS has budget alerts right? And I can read those budget alerts through their API.
So it would be trivial for me to poll their budget API for an alert, and immediatly trigger a shutdown of my Cloudfront service. Why can't they do that for me?
"AWS Budgets information is updated up to three times a day. Updates typically occur 8–12 hours after the previous update" [1]
Something based on this could be definitely better than nothing, but might also give false impression of safety.
[1] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cost-management/latest/userguide...
1 reply →
> AWS has budget alerts right?
Nope. Not in real time, they don't.
You can significantly overspend before the warning comes in.
What's spend limit?
Autoscaling is a feature!
I guess we need regulation for this.
Why do we need regulation? "Keep the service up no matter what happens, no matter the cost" is a useful business model for companies that make the mistake of promising too many nines to their customers.
The issue at hand is that people put small websites on hosting providers designed for megacorporation wealth, like Netlify. I highly doubt the average blog needs more than a $10 VPS located in one single country without automatic fallback to another data centre. You can probably even go with a $5 VPS if you don't care about the first wave of HN front page bots not being able to reach your site.
3 replies →
We don't need regulation for everything. Let customers vote with their wallet or even start a few lawsuits.
Adding more regulation makes the system slower.
4 replies →
Or, rather than creating more regulations, people could read the contracts they agree to when they get service, and use a competitor if they don't like it
8 replies →
Yep, for a static site you can throw nginx on some VPS for $10 a year and it'll handle a decent amount of traffic.