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The fact that the cloud allows hobbyists, small businesses, and massive enterprises ~equal access to services is amazing. However it means sometimes things lik

The fact that the cloud allows hobbyists, small businesses, and massive enterprises ~equal access to services is amazing. However it means sometimes things like this happen where a product’s incentives (serve any content at any cost) are wildly misaligned with a huge percentage of users needs (I’d rather my site, or preferably just the costly resource, be down than pay $2k). There’s endless tuning non-enterprises can do to get our ideal behavior: but that’s the difference between pre-cloud and post-cloud computing. It used to take monumental effort to build high scale high availability systems. Your $5/mo Dreamhost site would just die under load instead of charging you thousands. Now enterprise use cases are supported by default and it takes careful tuning to opt out.

Slartie 6y ago
Actually not even the typical $5/month cheap VPS offering would die under the "load" of 30TB of static content HTTP traffic being served in 2700 requests over a month. That's just a laughable drain on CPU resources that can easily be handled by even the cheapest virtual server offering, because it doesn't even get a single core of a modern CPU into the double digit utilization percentage range. The only thing that could happen is they cap your data transfer at some point. But there are cheap VPS providers out there offering several TB of gigabit speed traffic and throttling instead of a hard cap when you reach your limit.
- schmichael 6y ago
  Ah sorry, I used Dreamhost as they were one of the biggest shared hosting providers back in the day. No VPS, just a user account on a big host. They’ve likely evolved considerably since I last used them 10+ years ago. Point being their product was targeting me and designed appropriately. I forget the details but I know there were caps that were ample for my meager needs but would prevent this sort of accidental overage. My point is that compute has become a commodity like electricity but without the built in fuses. My residential box can’t pull industrial amps.

Slartie 6y ago

Actually not even the typical $5/month cheap VPS offering would die under the "load" of 30TB of static content HTTP traffic being served in 2700 requests over a month. That's just a laughable drain on CPU resources that can easily be handled by even the cheapest virtual server offering, because it doesn't even get a single core of a modern CPU into the double digit utilization percentage range. The only thing that could happen is they cap your data transfer at some point. But there are cheap VPS providers out there offering several TB of gigabit speed traffic and throttling instead of a hard cap when you reach your limit.

schmichael 6y ago
Ah sorry, I used Dreamhost as they were one of the biggest shared hosting providers back in the day. No VPS, just a user account on a big host. They’ve likely evolved considerably since I last used them 10+ years ago. Point being their product was targeting me and designed appropriately. I forget the details but I know there were caps that were ample for my meager needs but would prevent this sort of accidental overage. My point is that compute has become a commodity like electricity but without the built in fuses. My residential box can’t pull industrial amps.