Comment by baq
1 year ago
Host on a provider which bills per hour. This caps your cost. It also makes your users pissed because you will go down, but if you’re small, you can afford that. If you’re big, you already have scaling options and should have a team to handle ddos.
My experience is that customers don't really care that much about small amounts of downtime no matter what size you are, people mostly get that unexpected stuff happens as long as you don't get hacked or misplace their data. Customers might complain a bit but seldom leave because of a few hours downtime.
This seems to mostly hold true to developers also, GitHub manages to survive just fine after all.
Depends on your service. 20 second downtime on loading HN? Nobody cares. 20 second downtime on the last play of the Super Bowl - big problems.
For most internet consumers we’re accustomed to poor service so if a page doesn’t load we’ll assume it’s a local problem and try again 20 seconds later, same with buffering, it’s just something that happens occasionally. This is increasing the case for phone calls too. Legacy live tv and radio going silent though is still a major issue, especially on live events.
Sure, but now you're talking about sites with completely different service level objectives, and conversely, different budgets for their hosting. The problem here, to play off of your analogy, is that Netlify is treating every customer, many with SLOs likely less strict than HN as if they are the Super Bowl. This is an assumption that, according to the most recent policy discoverable by looking through their forum posts, is a constraint of their platform, and something they tout as a feature, not a bug.
When users expressed concerns for a similar scenario that the OP experienced on their community forum, Netlify's staff responded with "how likely is this, really?" Only has to happen once to put someone in significant financial harm.
Yeah. Any host that won't infinitely scale out will solve this concern for you.
I think most people pick Netlify for it's Infra as a Service offering, so it would be nice if they had a way to throttle and budget in that offering.
I would even imagine Netlify's target market is small to mid size businesses who really don't need ridiculous burstable scaling capacity at all. Seems like a bit of a trap door for that customer base.
I agree though, I wouldn't host on them as a small business due to that risk, but I am also happy running my own server so I might be an edge case.