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I would not be surprised if AWS actually allocates marketing dollars towards covering bills like this. In the long term this is a brilliant plan because it hel

I would not be surprised if AWS actually allocates marketing dollars towards covering bills like this. In the long term this is a brilliant plan because it helps prevent people from blacklisting the provider. Imagine someone gets hit with $3k bill on their personal, feels wronged, goes to work and makes effort at their employer to move off AWS. I don't know about most HN readers but I'd probably fall in this category and past places I've done work for were +$100k/month corporate bills with AWS.

dahdum 6y ago
My thoughts exactly - if I felt they burned me over $2k on my personal account they'd quickly lose a couple orders of magnitude more than that on corporate.
khuey 6y ago
It also doesn't cost AWS anywhere near $3k to actually move that data. Data transfer charges have to be a massive profit center for them.
- GordonS 6y ago
  Given VPS providers give you terabytes of bandwidth included even with cheap VPS', I'd say that a $3k bandwidth bill from AWS costs AWS pretty close to $0
  - kitteh 6y ago
    It's all about how much bps it was at peak. That drives scaling infrastructure which is real money also p95 billing). Sadly the world has gone in a diff direction when it comes to billing people. The rationale? Util based billing and p95 is too complicated.
    - imtringued 6y ago
      You don't pay less if you utilize the existing infrastructure more efficiently. There is no spot market for bandwidth.
dencodev 6y ago
Heroku really screwed me over once and the reps I spoke with were complete and total assholes and acted like I was in the wrong when it was their system that totally dropped the ball. I now advocate against them at my workplaces and I know it's cost them at minimum tens of thousands of dollars, though I get that isn't much money for them.
- Shank 6y ago
  > Heroku really screwed me over once How?
  - dencodev 6y ago
    There was a fraudulent and malicious DMCA claim against one of my sites. Heroku without any notice took down ALL of my sites, one of which was a part of my livelihood. They claimed they emailed me with 24 hour notice but that absolutely did not happen. I had to pound on their door to make them reverse it, they victim blamed me the entire time and had a super snarky and shitty attitude, told me I should have been more proactive about the notice I never got. I cannot in good faith ever recommend a service that would take down a website with zero notice and be so uncooperative in fixing what was ultimately their fault. It cost me money for that site to be down and I had to cancel my entire day to deal with them, and if the stakes were bigger it could easily wind up costing my employer hundreds of thousands of dollars.
distances 6y ago
> I don't know about most HN readers but I'd probably fall in this category and past places I've done work for were +$100k/month corporate bills with AWS. It's happening in this article too: Cloudflare wasn't in the wrong here, even the bill wasn't from Cloudflare, and the author is already publicly advocating against them. I feel quite uneasy about that.

dahdum 6y ago

My thoughts exactly - if I felt they burned me over $2k on my personal account they'd quickly lose a couple orders of magnitude more than that on corporate.

khuey 6y ago

It also doesn't cost AWS anywhere near $3k to actually move that data. Data transfer charges have to be a massive profit center for them.

GordonS 6y ago
Given VPS providers give you terabytes of bandwidth included even with cheap VPS', I'd say that a $3k bandwidth bill from AWS costs AWS pretty close to $0
- kitteh 6y ago
  It's all about how much bps it was at peak. That drives scaling infrastructure which is real money also p95 billing). Sadly the world has gone in a diff direction when it comes to billing people. The rationale? Util based billing and p95 is too complicated.
  - imtringued 6y ago
    You don't pay less if you utilize the existing infrastructure more efficiently. There is no spot market for bandwidth.

dencodev 6y ago

Heroku really screwed me over once and the reps I spoke with were complete and total assholes and acted like I was in the wrong when it was their system that totally dropped the ball. I now advocate against them at my workplaces and I know it's cost them at minimum tens of thousands of dollars, though I get that isn't much money for them.

Shank 6y ago
> Heroku really screwed me over once How?
- dencodev 6y ago
  There was a fraudulent and malicious DMCA claim against one of my sites. Heroku without any notice took down ALL of my sites, one of which was a part of my livelihood. They claimed they emailed me with 24 hour notice but that absolutely did not happen. I had to pound on their door to make them reverse it, they victim blamed me the entire time and had a super snarky and shitty attitude, told me I should have been more proactive about the notice I never got. I cannot in good faith ever recommend a service that would take down a website with zero notice and be so uncooperative in fixing what was ultimately their fault. It cost me money for that site to be down and I had to cancel my entire day to deal with them, and if the stakes were bigger it could easily wind up costing my employer hundreds of thousands of dollars.

distances 6y ago

> I don't know about most HN readers but I'd probably fall in this category and past places I've done work for were +$100k/month corporate bills with AWS. It's happening in this article too: Cloudflare wasn't in the wrong here, even the bill wasn't from Cloudflare, and the author is already publicly advocating against them. I feel quite uneasy about that.