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So which cloud provider offers a HARD spend limit? I just want to fund my account e.g. $20/month and never, ever, spend a cent over that. Even if my account get

So which cloud provider offers a HARD spend limit? I just want to fund my account e.g. $20/month and never, ever, spend a cent over that. Even if my account gets hacked for bitcoin mining or whatever, I don't want to spend a cent over that. With AWS, you can do it, via a trigger on a spend notification and a script, but the whole thing is a giant kludge. It should be a default feature. It should be a default feature for all cloud providers. I'm literally using them less because this isn't a feature they offer. Even the free tier of AWS is too risky without hard limits.

MMS21 5y ago
Hetzner
Datagenerator 5y ago
Digital Ocean could be interesting. Used to AWS and Azure but DO is doing great too
awsthro00945 5y ago
I think the closest you can get is using a VPS like DigitalOcean where you pay $X for a server and there's no autoscaling to worry about. But even with those, if you go over the bandwidth limit (although with DO the bandwidth limit is a lot higher) you would be charged more. The unfortunate reality is that hobby developers that just want to pay $20/month aren't the target audience for GCP etc. They don't really care if you're using them less for your personal hobby projects. They target large enterprises, and those large enterprises would have very little use for something like "cap my spend at $20". Even as an AWS employee, I sometimes use non-AWS hosting providers for my own projects. Even outside of the billing situation, AWS is often too complicated for my use cases. It's just not targeted at me and my hobby development projects. disclaimer: am AWS employee but the above is my own opinion and not official position of the company, etc etc.
- AstroDogCatcher 5y ago
  +1 to this; also an AWS employee, also use other VPS providers for personal projects (Hetzner and Vultr). Don't need the full breadth of AWS services to tinker with Caddy and Tailscale, but more than that I simply follow the practice of "don't shit where you eat".
- thayne 5y ago
  > and those large enterprises would have very little use for something like "cap my spend at $20". For the enterprise as a whole, probably not. But it would still be useful to be able to create sandbox accounts for experimentation with a hard limit on spend. Or give developers their own cloud accounts to run development and testing infrastructure that they can control, without having to worry about them accidentally spending way too much.
tfehring 5y ago
Edit: On second thought this is probably a bad idea, but I'm leaving my original comment below for posterity. Probably easiest to generate a virtual card number with a spend limit, off the top of my head I know Capital One offers this, Apple will also generate virtual card numbers though I don't know if you can set a spend limit on them.
- pxx 5y ago
  This just stops them from easily charging you. It doesn't change your liability.
  - tfehring 5y ago
    Yeah good point, I was thinking they'd cut your service off but on second thought that's probably not the case.
JoshWVS 5y ago
Not a full "cloud provider" per se, but you might want to check out NearlyFreeSpeech.net[0]. It's fully pay as you go--"If your balance runs out, your web site hosting suspends automatically." (I should note that I haven't used them myself, I'm just impressed by their website/business model.) [0]: https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/services/pricing https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/services/pricing
nijave 5y ago
Woah woah woah we're bashing AWS here :) Imo hard spend limit is a pretty complicated thing to implement and billing has historically been very batch based
kam 5y ago
Backblaze B2 has separate hard spending limits for storage, bandwidth, and requests, which is an elegant solution to the "but what happens to your data if you hit the limit?" objections you often see in these threads.
philsnow 5y ago
Maybe not the kind of "cloud provider" you're thinking about but tarsnap works on a prepaid basis. You top up your account and it debits that account daily. You get warnings when you go in the red. Super simple.
KronisLV 5y ago
> So which cloud provider offers a HARD spend limit? It still baffles me that this isn't the default. Then again, egress/ingress costs also baffle me, why not just offer capped speed and unlimited bandwidth? I doubt that i'll ever willingly use a platform that i pay for myself, which can just decide to charge me bunches of money because of my site/app getting DDoS'ed (assuming not all components are fully protected at the edge or something) or suddenly gaining popularity. In my eyes, such scalability should be opt in (or at least opt out) and by default my apps should just break under the load, much like any self-hosted software would, which may be preferable in some circumstances (e.g. API manages backpressure as best as it can, once request queues fill up, it just gives "503 Service Unavailable" with something like "Retry-After" and any clients/front ends are supposed to show messages to try again later, or automatically retry after a while). To that end, here's a list of providers that give you such fixed resources (in this case VPSes) and that i personally have used in the past: • Time4VPS: https://www.time4vps.com/?affid=5294 https://www.time4vps.com/?affid=5294 (currently hosts most of my sites, hence affiliate link) • Contabo: https://contabo.com/en/ https://contabo.com/en/ • Hetzner: https://www.hetzner.com/cloud https://www.hetzner.com/cloud • Scaleway: https://www.scaleway.com/en/elements/ https://www.scaleway.com/en/elements/ • Vultr: https://www.vultr.com/products/cloud-compute/ https://www.vultr.com/products/cloud-compute/ • DigitalOcean: https://www.digitalocean.com/products/droplets/ https://www.digitalocean.com/products/droplets/ Of course, some of those also offer managed services, but in my eyes it's far safer to just run MySQL/MariaDB/PostgreSQL/MongoDB/Redis and any other piece of software in Docker (or OCI compatible) containers, as opposed to using something proprietary, even with protocol compatibility. That way, it's also possible to migrate between providers easily, should the need arise.
- redwood 5y ago
  Would you be comfortable with losing all of your data and going down when the spend limit is hit? That's fundamentally why this is not as simple as you think
  - KronisLV 5y ago
    > Would you be comfortable with losing all of your data and going down when the spend limit is hit? This doesn't feel to me like a generous enough statement about all of the finer points. Would i be okay with my servers no longer responding to web requests (or doing so with reduced port speeds with some of the above hosts, e.g. Time4VPS) in case of spending limits being unexpectedly hit? Yes, definitely, since my projects going dark for a bit or slowing down would be preferable to me ending up not being able to pay my rent and having to rely on public outcry about the large bill and the vendor's mood that day towards letting that one slide. Would i be okay with my servers running out of space and no longer writing new data to any database, merely responding with the appropriate errors instead? Yes, definitely, because that probably signals the fact that for some reason lots of space has suddenly started getting used for no reason, something that happened so fast that i didn't even get to plan the appropriate scaling, once Zabbix would warn me about 80% of the disk being full (or any monitoring tool would have an alert set up for this). This would probably also be yet another sanity check. Would i be okay with my servers suddenly ceasing to exist and being wiped from existence, for any reason short of excessive abuse complaints or repeated ToS violations? I most certainly wouldn't want this to happen, yet in my experience it has never actually happened - some of the vendors listed allow you to pre pay for the resources you're about to use (e.g. Time4VPS and Contabo), even offering discounts for longer term reservations much like AWS does, without unexpected charges to you like AWS would do. In contrast, some of the other vendors listed allow you to pay based on hourly usage (Hetzner, Scaleway, Vultr, DigitalOcean, at least IIRC), but also won't have unpredictable pricing spikes because of set limits for the most part (ingress/egress charges may still apply, however, a worrying trend in the industry that muddies the waters), if i pay for a 5$ VPS every month, that's what i can expect to pay most months regardless of usage (assuming 100% uptime). With these factors in mind, my servers being wiped would probably have to happen due to either me misusing those services, or alternatively me failing to pay the bills even with the more predictable pricing structures, which is actually very much like a person's electricity being turned off due to them not paying for it - as unpleasant as that'd be, no surprises there. Personally, i don't subscribe to the belief that managed services with unpredictable billing are the only way to do software nowadays, something that Richard Stallman coined as SaaSS (Services as a Software Substitute) and about which you can read more here: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-serve.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-s... Alas, as long VPS uptime with predefined resources is the unit of computation that you're paying for, everything else should be fairly simple from there onwards.
redwood 5y ago
Would you be comfortable with losing all of your data and going down when the spend limit is hit? That's fundamentally why this is not as simple as you think

MMS21 5y ago

Hetzner

Datagenerator 5y ago

Digital Ocean could be interesting. Used to AWS and Azure but DO is doing great too

awsthro00945 5y ago

I think the closest you can get is using a VPS like DigitalOcean where you pay $X for a server and there's no autoscaling to worry about. But even with those, if you go over the bandwidth limit (although with DO the bandwidth limit is a lot higher) you would be charged more. The unfortunate reality is that hobby developers that just want to pay $20/month aren't the target audience for GCP etc. They don't really care if you're using them less for your personal hobby projects. They target large enterprises, and those large enterprises would have very little use for something like "cap my spend at $20". Even as an AWS employee, I sometimes use non-AWS hosting providers for my own projects. Even outside of the billing situation, AWS is often too complicated for my use cases. It's just not targeted at me and my hobby development projects. disclaimer: am AWS employee but the above is my own opinion and not official position of the company, etc etc.

AstroDogCatcher 5y ago
+1 to this; also an AWS employee, also use other VPS providers for personal projects (Hetzner and Vultr). Don't need the full breadth of AWS services to tinker with Caddy and Tailscale, but more than that I simply follow the practice of "don't shit where you eat".
thayne 5y ago
> and those large enterprises would have very little use for something like "cap my spend at $20". For the enterprise as a whole, probably not. But it would still be useful to be able to create sandbox accounts for experimentation with a hard limit on spend. Or give developers their own cloud accounts to run development and testing infrastructure that they can control, without having to worry about them accidentally spending way too much.

tfehring 5y ago

Edit: On second thought this is probably a bad idea, but I'm leaving my original comment below for posterity. Probably easiest to generate a virtual card number with a spend limit, off the top of my head I know Capital One offers this, Apple will also generate virtual card numbers though I don't know if you can set a spend limit on them.

pxx 5y ago
This just stops them from easily charging you. It doesn't change your liability.
- tfehring 5y ago
  Yeah good point, I was thinking they'd cut your service off but on second thought that's probably not the case.

JoshWVS 5y ago

Not a full "cloud provider" per se, but you might want to check out NearlyFreeSpeech.net[0]. It's fully pay as you go--"If your balance runs out, your web site hosting suspends automatically." (I should note that I haven't used them myself, I'm just impressed by their website/business model.) [0]: https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/services/pricing https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/services/pricing

nijave 5y ago

Woah woah woah we're bashing AWS here :) Imo hard spend limit is a pretty complicated thing to implement and billing has historically been very batch based

kam 5y ago

Backblaze B2 has separate hard spending limits for storage, bandwidth, and requests, which is an elegant solution to the "but what happens to your data if you hit the limit?" objections you often see in these threads.

philsnow 5y ago

Maybe not the kind of "cloud provider" you're thinking about but tarsnap works on a prepaid basis. You top up your account and it debits that account daily. You get warnings when you go in the red. Super simple.

KronisLV 5y ago

> So which cloud provider offers a HARD spend limit? It still baffles me that this isn't the default. Then again, egress/ingress costs also baffle me, why not just offer capped speed and unlimited bandwidth? I doubt that i'll ever willingly use a platform that i pay for myself, which can just decide to charge me bunches of money because of my site/app getting DDoS'ed (assuming not all components are fully protected at the edge or something) or suddenly gaining popularity. In my eyes, such scalability should be opt in (or at least opt out) and by default my apps should just break under the load, much like any self-hosted software would, which may be preferable in some circumstances (e.g. API manages backpressure as best as it can, once request queues fill up, it just gives "503 Service Unavailable" with something like "Retry-After" and any clients/front ends are supposed to show messages to try again later, or automatically retry after a while). To that end, here's a list of providers that give you such fixed resources (in this case VPSes) and that i personally have used in the past: • Time4VPS: https://www.time4vps.com/?affid=5294 https://www.time4vps.com/?affid=5294 (currently hosts most of my sites, hence affiliate link) • Contabo: https://contabo.com/en/ https://contabo.com/en/ • Hetzner: https://www.hetzner.com/cloud https://www.hetzner.com/cloud • Scaleway: https://www.scaleway.com/en/elements/ https://www.scaleway.com/en/elements/ • Vultr: https://www.vultr.com/products/cloud-compute/ https://www.vultr.com/products/cloud-compute/ • DigitalOcean: https://www.digitalocean.com/products/droplets/ https://www.digitalocean.com/products/droplets/ Of course, some of those also offer managed services, but in my eyes it's far safer to just run MySQL/MariaDB/PostgreSQL/MongoDB/Redis and any other piece of software in Docker (or OCI compatible) containers, as opposed to using something proprietary, even with protocol compatibility. That way, it's also possible to migrate between providers easily, should the need arise.

redwood 5y ago
Would you be comfortable with losing all of your data and going down when the spend limit is hit? That's fundamentally why this is not as simple as you think
- KronisLV 5y ago
  > Would you be comfortable with losing all of your data and going down when the spend limit is hit? This doesn't feel to me like a generous enough statement about all of the finer points. Would i be okay with my servers no longer responding to web requests (or doing so with reduced port speeds with some of the above hosts, e.g. Time4VPS) in case of spending limits being unexpectedly hit? Yes, definitely, since my projects going dark for a bit or slowing down would be preferable to me ending up not being able to pay my rent and having to rely on public outcry about the large bill and the vendor's mood that day towards letting that one slide. Would i be okay with my servers running out of space and no longer writing new data to any database, merely responding with the appropriate errors instead? Yes, definitely, because that probably signals the fact that for some reason lots of space has suddenly started getting used for no reason, something that happened so fast that i didn't even get to plan the appropriate scaling, once Zabbix would warn me about 80% of the disk being full (or any monitoring tool would have an alert set up for this). This would probably also be yet another sanity check. Would i be okay with my servers suddenly ceasing to exist and being wiped from existence, for any reason short of excessive abuse complaints or repeated ToS violations? I most certainly wouldn't want this to happen, yet in my experience it has never actually happened - some of the vendors listed allow you to pre pay for the resources you're about to use (e.g. Time4VPS and Contabo), even offering discounts for longer term reservations much like AWS does, without unexpected charges to you like AWS would do. In contrast, some of the other vendors listed allow you to pay based on hourly usage (Hetzner, Scaleway, Vultr, DigitalOcean, at least IIRC), but also won't have unpredictable pricing spikes because of set limits for the most part (ingress/egress charges may still apply, however, a worrying trend in the industry that muddies the waters), if i pay for a 5$ VPS every month, that's what i can expect to pay most months regardless of usage (assuming 100% uptime). With these factors in mind, my servers being wiped would probably have to happen due to either me misusing those services, or alternatively me failing to pay the bills even with the more predictable pricing structures, which is actually very much like a person's electricity being turned off due to them not paying for it - as unpleasant as that'd be, no surprises there. Personally, i don't subscribe to the belief that managed services with unpredictable billing are the only way to do software nowadays, something that Richard Stallman coined as SaaSS (Services as a Software Substitute) and about which you can read more here: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-serve.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-s... Alas, as long VPS uptime with predefined resources is the unit of computation that you're paying for, everything else should be fairly simple from there onwards.

redwood 5y ago

Would you be comfortable with losing all of your data and going down when the spend limit is hit? That's fundamentally why this is not as simple as you think