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Can HN really deliver enough traffic to a static site to cost a significant amount? I've had mildly popular posts on HN for my Netlify blog (John Carmack tweete

Can HN really deliver enough traffic to a static site to cost a significant amount? I've had mildly popular posts on HN for my Netlify blog (John Carmack tweeted about it!) and not had to pay for bandwidth.

donmcronald 6y ago
No. I don't think so. The concern for me is a lack of hard limit on spending on GCP, Azure, and AWS. If I screw up and allocate a bunch of resources unintentionally, I'm left holding the bill. That's a terrible setup for PaaS because all programming involves mistakes eventually, especially for new users learning the system. Granted, there are likely limits on accounts, but those are to protect the services from fraud, no to protect the user from overspending. The limits aren't well defined and it's not something you can rely on because MS might consider $10k / month a small account while it's a ton of money for me. Azure customers have been asking for hard limits on spending for 8 [1] years with radio silence for the last 5. There's a difference in goals I guess. If I spend more than expected I WANT things to break. Microsoft, Google, and Azure want me to spend unlimited amounts of money, even if I don't have it. At least AWS can be set up using a prepaid credit card so if I screw up they have to call me to collect their money and I negotiate. 1. https://feedback.azure.com/forums/170030-signup-and-billing/suggestions/3238796-spending-limit-or-maximum-cost-cap-for-azure https://feedback.azure.com/forums/170030-signup-and-billing/...
- user5994461 6y ago
  Yes it can, if you consider hundreds of dollars a significant amount. I do. A good article is around 50k visits. The most I've done was 300k over a few days of going viral on HN/reddit/twitter/other. I published some stats there https://thehftguy.com/2017/09/26/hitting-hacker-news-front-page-how-much-traffic-do-you-get/ https://thehftguy.com/2017/09/26/hitting-hacker-news-front-p...
- ev1 6y ago
  It's a difference in goals. - Hobby kid doesn't want to overpay, shut everything down - Business absolutely doesn't care about spend, if they get some kind of marketing result traffic spike they just want the site to stay up even if it blows the average budget Guess which one they optimise for?
  - FpUser 6y ago
    >"Business absolutely doesn't care about spend, if they get some kind of marketing result traffic spike they just want the site to stay up even if it blows the average budget" While this statement can be true in some cases I vividly remember bosses of largish (budget wise company) running around like headless chickens yelling to kill every running instance of service just because they were hit by way more "success" that they've planned for.
  - bleepblorp 6y ago
    Very large businesses might not care about spend, but pretty much everyone else does. Almost everyone will be unhappy if they're stuck with a six figure bill for non-converting visits because their site went viral. Everyone will be unhappy if they're stuck with a six figure bill because their site was used in a DDoS reflection attack, or got pwned and used in a DDoS attack directly. Everything I run on nickle-and-dime-to-death cloud services, such as AWS, won't even respond to unauthenticated requests (Nginx return 444, or reachable only via Wireguard) precisely to mitigate this risk. To do anything else is just financially irresponsible. I've even considered coding a kill switch that will shut down AWS instances if they exceed billing limits, but the fact that AWS charges a fee to check your spend via an API makes this awkward and speaks volumes about Amazon's motivations. Amazon's refusal to offer spending caps on AWS benefits Amazon and only Amazon.
    - mwarkentin 6y ago
      They have free anomaly detection on spending now (not sure how useful yet).
- manigandham 6y ago
  Hard spend limits are not an easy problem with cloud. There are too many things that incur costs. Everytime this comes up, I ask the same question: what do you expect to happen when the quota is hit? Shutdown your servers? Wipe your SSDs and storage buckets? Remove your DNS records? Should it be permanent? If not then they're just subsidizing the costs. If it's soft-limit then its just a warning, and if you just want a warning then billing alarms already exist in every cloud. Also for most customers, the data and service is far more important than the cost. Bills can be negotiated or forgiven afterwards. Lost data and customers can't.
  - fauigerzigerk 6y ago
    I want all services to be rate limited. What I don't want is for some runaway process (whatever the cause) to bankrupt me before I can respond to any alerts (i.e within hours). In other words, I don't necessarily need to set a hard spending limit, but I want to set a hard spending growth limit (allowing for short bursts), either directly in monetary terms or indirectly through rate limits on individual services.
    - ngcc_hk 6y ago
      I avoid those for the sane reason. I do not mind to pay for a few dollars for side projects. But not unlimited bill.
  - donmcronald 6y ago
    > Shutdown your servers? Wipe your SSDs and storage buckets? Remove your DNS records? Should it be permanent? I'd be absolutely fine with that in a sub-account or resource group as long as I had to enable it. A while back I wanted to try out an Azure Resource Manager template as part of learning something. Since I was _learning_ it, I wasn't 100% positive what it was going to do, but I knew that it should cost about $1 to deploy it. With a hard limit on spending I would have set it to $10, run the thing and been ok with the account being wiped if I hit $10. Even $100 I could tolerate. Unlimited $$ was too risky for me, so I chickened out. The worst part is I can't even delete my CC because it's tied to an expired trial that I can't update billing for. > Also for most customers, the data and service is far more important than the cost. So don't enable the hard limit.
- raphaelj 6y ago
  I can't agree more with that. I run a small side business, and these unlimited cloud plans are just a no go. A medium to large company could totally absorb a 5 figures bill, but that would be a dead sentence to my side project. Also, considering the variable costs of bandwidth of AWS, Azure or Cloudflare, one competitor could simple rent an OVH server and incur insane costs to my business while only spending 1/10 of the money. Right now, I'm using Heroku (with a limited number of dynos and a single PgSQL database) together with BunnyCDN (which allow me to pay for prepaid usage). If I ever get DDoS'ed, my app will most probably be inaccessible or at least significantly slower, while I'll receive an email alert, from which I can decide myself to allocate more resources.
mdoms 6y ago
No. I once had a site hit #1 on HN. It was hosted on a Dreamhost shared VPC with Wordpress. It barely broke a sweat. I have no idea what these guys are doing who are having their sites bulldozed by HN traffic but it's worryingly common for something that should never happen.
- user5994461 6y ago
  I've had #1 multiple times. I've had articles that stayed on the front page for multiple days. Wouldn't be surprised if I'm top 1% of personal bloggers on HN or something like that. I'd be shelling out AWS thousands of dollars over the years if I were using anything AWS, or more likely I'd be either broke or the blog would have crumbled under the traffic each time never going viral.
  - viraptor 6y ago
    That's simply not true. I hit #1 a few times with content hosted on S3. Ended up paying maybe extra $2 those months. I'd be worried if I hosted any large files that came with it, but just a blog post? Barely noticeable.
    - user5994461 6y ago
      I have images in almost every post. Diagram, schemas, stock images, gif, anything. I guess you don't? The difference between $2 and $20 will strike when you start having pictures and with $200 the day you (accidentally) put a large image or GIF.
      - viraptor 6y ago
        You can lose money accidentally in many ways. I agree you have to watch out, but still disagree with the number of people dismissing S3 as a quick way to bankruptcy if you get HN #1.
        NikolaeVarius 6y ago
brightball 6y ago
I’ve had a couple of front page posts with good discussion. Generated about 35,000 unique visits over 24 hours.

donmcronald 6y ago

No. I don't think so. The concern for me is a lack of hard limit on spending on GCP, Azure, and AWS. If I screw up and allocate a bunch of resources unintentionally, I'm left holding the bill. That's a terrible setup for PaaS because all programming involves mistakes eventually, especially for new users learning the system. Granted, there are likely limits on accounts, but those are to protect the services from fraud, no to protect the user from overspending. The limits aren't well defined and it's not something you can rely on because MS might consider $10k / month a small account while it's a ton of money for me. Azure customers have been asking for hard limits on spending for 8 [1] years with radio silence for the last 5. There's a difference in goals I guess. If I spend more than expected I WANT things to break. Microsoft, Google, and Azure want me to spend unlimited amounts of money, even if I don't have it. At least AWS can be set up using a prepaid credit card so if I screw up they have to call me to collect their money and I negotiate. 1. https://feedback.azure.com/forums/170030-signup-and-billing/suggestions/3238796-spending-limit-or-maximum-cost-cap-for-azure https://feedback.azure.com/forums/170030-signup-and-billing/...

user5994461 6y ago
Yes it can, if you consider hundreds of dollars a significant amount. I do. A good article is around 50k visits. The most I've done was 300k over a few days of going viral on HN/reddit/twitter/other. I published some stats there https://thehftguy.com/2017/09/26/hitting-hacker-news-front-page-how-much-traffic-do-you-get/ https://thehftguy.com/2017/09/26/hitting-hacker-news-front-p...
ev1 6y ago
It's a difference in goals. - Hobby kid doesn't want to overpay, shut everything down - Business absolutely doesn't care about spend, if they get some kind of marketing result traffic spike they just want the site to stay up even if it blows the average budget Guess which one they optimise for?
- FpUser 6y ago
  >"Business absolutely doesn't care about spend, if they get some kind of marketing result traffic spike they just want the site to stay up even if it blows the average budget" While this statement can be true in some cases I vividly remember bosses of largish (budget wise company) running around like headless chickens yelling to kill every running instance of service just because they were hit by way more "success" that they've planned for.
- bleepblorp 6y ago
  Very large businesses might not care about spend, but pretty much everyone else does. Almost everyone will be unhappy if they're stuck with a six figure bill for non-converting visits because their site went viral. Everyone will be unhappy if they're stuck with a six figure bill because their site was used in a DDoS reflection attack, or got pwned and used in a DDoS attack directly. Everything I run on nickle-and-dime-to-death cloud services, such as AWS, won't even respond to unauthenticated requests (Nginx return 444, or reachable only via Wireguard) precisely to mitigate this risk. To do anything else is just financially irresponsible. I've even considered coding a kill switch that will shut down AWS instances if they exceed billing limits, but the fact that AWS charges a fee to check your spend via an API makes this awkward and speaks volumes about Amazon's motivations. Amazon's refusal to offer spending caps on AWS benefits Amazon and only Amazon.
  - mwarkentin 6y ago
    They have free anomaly detection on spending now (not sure how useful yet).
manigandham 6y ago
Hard spend limits are not an easy problem with cloud. There are too many things that incur costs. Everytime this comes up, I ask the same question: what do you expect to happen when the quota is hit? Shutdown your servers? Wipe your SSDs and storage buckets? Remove your DNS records? Should it be permanent? If not then they're just subsidizing the costs. If it's soft-limit then its just a warning, and if you just want a warning then billing alarms already exist in every cloud. Also for most customers, the data and service is far more important than the cost. Bills can be negotiated or forgiven afterwards. Lost data and customers can't.
- fauigerzigerk 6y ago
  I want all services to be rate limited. What I don't want is for some runaway process (whatever the cause) to bankrupt me before I can respond to any alerts (i.e within hours). In other words, I don't necessarily need to set a hard spending limit, but I want to set a hard spending growth limit (allowing for short bursts), either directly in monetary terms or indirectly through rate limits on individual services.
  - ngcc_hk 6y ago
    I avoid those for the sane reason. I do not mind to pay for a few dollars for side projects. But not unlimited bill.
- donmcronald 6y ago
  > Shutdown your servers? Wipe your SSDs and storage buckets? Remove your DNS records? Should it be permanent? I'd be absolutely fine with that in a sub-account or resource group as long as I had to enable it. A while back I wanted to try out an Azure Resource Manager template as part of learning something. Since I was _learning_ it, I wasn't 100% positive what it was going to do, but I knew that it should cost about $1 to deploy it. With a hard limit on spending I would have set it to $10, run the thing and been ok with the account being wiped if I hit $10. Even $100 I could tolerate. Unlimited $$ was too risky for me, so I chickened out. The worst part is I can't even delete my CC because it's tied to an expired trial that I can't update billing for. > Also for most customers, the data and service is far more important than the cost. So don't enable the hard limit.
raphaelj 6y ago
I can't agree more with that. I run a small side business, and these unlimited cloud plans are just a no go. A medium to large company could totally absorb a 5 figures bill, but that would be a dead sentence to my side project. Also, considering the variable costs of bandwidth of AWS, Azure or Cloudflare, one competitor could simple rent an OVH server and incur insane costs to my business while only spending 1/10 of the money. Right now, I'm using Heroku (with a limited number of dynos and a single PgSQL database) together with BunnyCDN (which allow me to pay for prepaid usage). If I ever get DDoS'ed, my app will most probably be inaccessible or at least significantly slower, while I'll receive an email alert, from which I can decide myself to allocate more resources.

mdoms 6y ago

No. I once had a site hit #1 on HN. It was hosted on a Dreamhost shared VPC with Wordpress. It barely broke a sweat. I have no idea what these guys are doing who are having their sites bulldozed by HN traffic but it's worryingly common for something that should never happen.

user5994461 6y ago
I've had #1 multiple times. I've had articles that stayed on the front page for multiple days. Wouldn't be surprised if I'm top 1% of personal bloggers on HN or something like that. I'd be shelling out AWS thousands of dollars over the years if I were using anything AWS, or more likely I'd be either broke or the blog would have crumbled under the traffic each time never going viral.
- viraptor 6y ago
  That's simply not true. I hit #1 a few times with content hosted on S3. Ended up paying maybe extra $2 those months. I'd be worried if I hosted any large files that came with it, but just a blog post? Barely noticeable.
  - user5994461 6y ago
    I have images in almost every post. Diagram, schemas, stock images, gif, anything. I guess you don't? The difference between $2 and $20 will strike when you start having pictures and with $200 the day you (accidentally) put a large image or GIF.
    - viraptor 6y ago
      You can lose money accidentally in many ways. I agree you have to watch out, but still disagree with the number of people dismissing S3 as a quick way to bankruptcy if you get HN #1.
      - NikolaeVarius 6y ago

brightball 6y ago

I’ve had a couple of front page posts with good discussion. Generated about 35,000 unique visits over 24 hours.