5 ms·

Agreed fully. I always have an escape strategy in mind if things go south, but I'm pretty bullish on DO right now. That could always change, certainly.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
tempsy 7y ago
curious what makes you bullish? i'm a total outsider but it does feel like the walls are closing around smaller players as the big get bigger.
- op00to 7y ago
  Digital Ocean gives me peace of mind. Unlike Amazon or Google, I am confident I'm not going to get a $300k bill from DO overnight.
  - samsepi0l 7y ago
    This is actually huge. Especially in a startup or other small business. Misconfiguring something in AWS (or just simply not understanding their contrived billing models) can get unpredictably expensive.
    - tempsy 7y ago
      what about Linode?
      - samsepi0l 7y ago
        They are great too, I see them on par with DO
    - isop 7y ago
      What about AWS Lightsail? https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/pricing/
  - arcticfox 7y ago
    I'm still amazed that there's no billing cap in Amzn/Goog. Google tried to charge me $1000 for a service normally costing $1 / mo because of a runaway restart issue. I had a $2 / mo "max budget" on it and we responded within minutes of receiving a budget alert. I only got them to reverse the charge after doing a ton of work to prove that my team reacted in <15 minutes, and it was their budget alert that was more than 6 hours late. They still seemed to think that was fine (?!) but because I had some great graphs and a HN-oriented blogpost ready to go, they reversed it anyways. That sounds kind of like blackmail, now that I think about it, but no more than what they're doing sounds like fraud.
    - awinter-py 7y ago
      not blackmail I suspect -- you're asking them to stick by their contractual responsibilities / make up for their own failure to notify you in an edge case on the face of it, them exceeding their max budget probably puts them in the wrong if this went to third-party arbitration
    - fragmede 7y ago
      It's glaringly obvious that a hard cap on the budget is a missing feature, since all projects need to deal with billing. What's even more bizarre, is that Google's docs include a tutorial, with code, on how to set up this feature. To me, this says that the shortcoming has been noted, and then a product manager has argued against implementation. If I squint I can even justify it - shutting down a website right when it gets hugely popular is not something that's easily reversed, while it's pretty easy for GCP to write off a bill for $1k. The tutorial's budget hard limit system is actually kinda interesting as it dogfoods GCP - the budget-hit notification is sent via GCP pubsub, and a lambda (aka Google Cloud Function) then removes the billing account from the project, which shuts down the project's resources. https://cloud.google.com/billing/docs/how-to/notify#cap_disable_billing_to_stop_usage https://cloud.google.com/billing/docs/how-to/notify#cap_disa... (To be clear, having to write/tweak code and deploy this myself is a suboptimal solution to the problem but it's neat from an engineering perspective.)

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

tempsy 7y ago

curious what makes you bullish? i'm a total outsider but it does feel like the walls are closing around smaller players as the big get bigger.

op00to 7y ago
Digital Ocean gives me peace of mind. Unlike Amazon or Google, I am confident I'm not going to get a $300k bill from DO overnight.
- samsepi0l 7y ago
  This is actually huge. Especially in a startup or other small business. Misconfiguring something in AWS (or just simply not understanding their contrived billing models) can get unpredictably expensive.
  - tempsy 7y ago
    what about Linode?
    - samsepi0l 7y ago
      They are great too, I see them on par with DO
  - isop 7y ago
    What about AWS Lightsail? https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/pricing/
- arcticfox 7y ago
  I'm still amazed that there's no billing cap in Amzn/Goog. Google tried to charge me $1000 for a service normally costing $1 / mo because of a runaway restart issue. I had a $2 / mo "max budget" on it and we responded within minutes of receiving a budget alert. I only got them to reverse the charge after doing a ton of work to prove that my team reacted in <15 minutes, and it was their budget alert that was more than 6 hours late. They still seemed to think that was fine (?!) but because I had some great graphs and a HN-oriented blogpost ready to go, they reversed it anyways. That sounds kind of like blackmail, now that I think about it, but no more than what they're doing sounds like fraud.
  - awinter-py 7y ago
    not blackmail I suspect -- you're asking them to stick by their contractual responsibilities / make up for their own failure to notify you in an edge case on the face of it, them exceeding their max budget probably puts them in the wrong if this went to third-party arbitration
  - fragmede 7y ago
    It's glaringly obvious that a hard cap on the budget is a missing feature, since all projects need to deal with billing. What's even more bizarre, is that Google's docs include a tutorial, with code, on how to set up this feature. To me, this says that the shortcoming has been noted, and then a product manager has argued against implementation. If I squint I can even justify it - shutting down a website right when it gets hugely popular is not something that's easily reversed, while it's pretty easy for GCP to write off a bill for $1k. The tutorial's budget hard limit system is actually kinda interesting as it dogfoods GCP - the budget-hit notification is sent via GCP pubsub, and a lambda (aka Google Cloud Function) then removes the billing account from the project, which shuts down the project's resources. https://cloud.google.com/billing/docs/how-to/notify#cap_disable_billing_to_stop_usage https://cloud.google.com/billing/docs/how-to/notify#cap_disa... (To be clear, having to write/tweak code and deploy this myself is a suboptimal solution to the problem but it's neat from an engineering perspective.)