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Every cloud makes this mistake easy! You have to manually activate billing alerts for everyone because they want you to spend more snd more each month. I am st

by tpetry 5y ago

Every cloud makes this mistake easy! You have to manually activate billing alerts for everyone because they want you to spend more snd more each month. I am still waiting for a cloud without these dark patterns. But that will never happen because it‘s leaving a big amount of money on the table by not being hostile.

TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
> I am still waiting for a cloud without these dark patterns. This is how mobile and landline phone companies made enormous fortunes before flat rate billing. It’s called post-paid vs pre-paid billing.
iso1631 5y ago
Get a VPS from linode for $5 a month and it costs $5 a month.
- nix23 5y ago
  Or hetzner, or Vultr.
- gkhartman 5y ago
  They have transfer limits and an associated overage fee iirc. I can still see this sort of thing happening if that is the case.
  - iso1631 5y ago
    My understanding is you hit your bandwidth cap and that's it, no more bandwidth. (edit) looks like that's not the case, I'm sure I used to have to buy a second instance a few years ago if I did want to use more bandwidth that was allocated
  - BenjiWiebe 5y ago
    I barely even realized that, since my hobby stuff doesn't come anywhere near the limit. For those curious, the overage rate is $10/TB ($0.01/GB) after the transfer included in the plan. The smallest amount of included transfer is 1TB for the $5/mo VPS.
    - Ostrogodsky 5y ago
      Or just go with Hetzner and have a limit 20X as big with cheaper prices https://www.hetzner.com/cloud https://www.hetzner.com/cloud
- tpetry 5y ago
  Sure that's what i am doing. A beefy dedicated machine with no bandwidth pricing. But that also means i need to do everything by my own. I don't get any of the worry-free services of AWS.
  - iso1631 5y ago
    Like the $10k/day bills? Odd definition of 'worry free'
  - nojito 5y ago
    How is surprise billing not a worry?
  - christophilus 5y ago
    I worry far less about my Netcup servers + BunnyCDN than I ever did about my AWS bills.
- ozim 5y ago
  Not really as there is network traffic quota: If you use up your monthly network transfer pool, you can continue to use your Linodes normally. That being said, you will be charged $0.01 for each additional GB at the end of your billing cycle.
- hkt 5y ago
  Personally I like Mythic Beasts and use their raspberry pi servers and VPSes. Much less terrifying pricing and the support is good too.
  - tome 5y ago
    Yes, their support is amazing. I can email the support address and have a real human who knows what he/she is doing reply within minutes or hours at most.
    - hkt 5y ago
      Exactly! It is quite refreshing to not have to battle past first line to find someone with the understanding to help. No shibboleth required. Cheaper hosting, too.
nix23 5y ago
>Every cloud makes this mistake easy! Funny enough...Oracle (OCI) makes it better, you can buy oracle"coins" 1to1 with $ and load your account just with what you think you need.
- christophilus 5y ago
  If Oracle cloud is still shenanigan free in 2 decades, I’ll consider it. Until then, Oracle gets $0 of any budget I’m in charge of.
  - nix23 5y ago
    See you when your a even more inflexible (and old) guy who makes the bet on one horse, look i give a *hit about (or anyone else) oracle, what i care for is migration without problems from one provider to another. Hard requirement: My image can run on it (freebsd and linux), no proprietary BS, no special stuff, give me vm-"harware" make it fast, make it cheap, make it reliable, that's it..that's it. And ATM i like oracle hetzner and vultr at most. If one of those change to my disgust i change, no big deal...just some dns rewrite.
  - Nextgrid 5y ago
    The Oracle cloud UI is extremely slow and terrible to work with. I'd prefer shenanigans every so often than having to deal with that crap on a daily basis.
    - nix23 5y ago
      Kind of funny, for me it's faster then Amazon.
harry8 5y ago
Dark patterns - this sounds like a colour scheme you don't care for. "Predatory death-trap pricing" captures the spirit of the thing with rather more clarity. It is wholly intentional after all.
- gwd 5y ago
  > Dark patterns - this sounds like a colour scheme you don't care for. Or craft clothing for goths? But the "dark" comes from its association with evil: "Defense against the Dark Arts", "The Dark Lord", "Turn to the Dark Side of the Force". It's a clear implication that the people are "selling their souls to the devil": knowingly doing something "a little bit evil" to achieve their aims.
- OrderlyTiamat 5y ago
  > Dark patterns - this sounds like a colour scheme you don't care for. I can see your point- if I'd never seen the term before I might have a similar reaction. But it's quite a common term now I think.
  - harry8 5y ago
    Not it is not. It is common industry jargon for people who work with websites. Nobody else knows what it is. If you had to pick a term to sound as inoffensive as possible for fraudulent, deceptive conduct while still sort of capturing the thing without being abjectly false you could do no better than something that sounds like a colourscheme. "Mr Politician what do you think about $big_co using dark patterns?" "Mr Politician what do you think about $big_co engaging in predatory death-trap pricing schemes to defraud consumers?" What is being asked in one of those questions is clear to everybody. The other is jargon and excludes the majority of the population from understanding the intended meaning. And note, you don't have to agree that it is "predatory death-trap pricing" at all. That is simply in the above sentence an accusation. Words have meanings. That the accusation be understood clearly by as many people as possible is important.
    - OrderlyTiamat 5y ago
Dave3of5 5y ago
Also the billing alerts is just that an alert. They should have something in place to put a hard cap on monthly spend. That way his free website would go offline when he's spent > $X. As you say they make it hard deliberately. Edit: Turn out Azure have this: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cost-management-billing/manage/spending-limit https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cost-management-billi...
- fendy3002 5y ago
  Eh after skimming it I feel like there's still gotchas with it. Not every account can turn it on and looks like there aren't custom limit. CMIIW, it'll be my first cloud provider if I can set one.
- danuker 5y ago
  I see there is a spending limit for the "intro" or "preview" plans designed for students, Visual Studio users, and resellers (the "hook" part in "hook, line, and sinker"). Not for actual cloud usage, like an actual pay-as-you-go plan where this would be useful. https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/support/legal/offer-details/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/support/legal/offer-detail...
  - ghaff 5y ago
    Yeah, there are trial accounts and things but as far as I know, none of the big cloud providers have a way to say "Under no circumstances are you to charge me for than $X per month even if it means shutting down services."
  - Dave3of5 5y ago
    Yeah I see that too I'll add that to my comment tbh I think what I said still stand it's been made hard or maybe said a different way is: It's very easy to overspend on these big cloud providers Oh I can't edit the comment now oh well sorry if I've confused anyone.
  - Monotoko 5y ago
    A lot of Chinese cloud providers like Aliyun will only allow pay and go, because there’s no way to recursively bill My own instances go down all the time when I forget to ‘top up’ the account
dx034 5y ago
Hetzner's cloud offer is limited but they limit your possible spending by default and it's very easy to set up billing alerts. I guess they mostly do it to ensure they get the money at the end of the month, but it's equally useful for their users.
- tpetry 5y ago
  Additionally Hetzner's egress pricing is a lot more cheaper. On hetzenr you pay 1,19€/TB (1.13$/TB) vs. 90$/TB on AWS. That's about ~80 time more on AWS!
sgustard 5y ago
If I leave my water running then go on vacation I'll have a huge water bill too. I don't conclude my water company is intentionally trying to overcharge me. The more reasonable conclusion is: building an alert system that addresses every customer need is hard. Most enterprises (where all the customer focus is) want minimal downtime above other considerations, including cost.
- addicted 5y ago
  This is like you leaving your tap running slightly as you go on winter vacation so the pipes don’t freeze over. But the water company does not actually allow you to install proper taps to regulate the water so you use duct tape to do so, and due to an earthquake something falls on the tap causing your duct tape solution to fail leading to a massive surge of water, leading to your massive water bill. Did the water company cause this? No. Your duct tape solution wasn’t resilient enough because it didn’t factor in an earthquake. But I would be justifiably mad that my water company does not allow me to install actual taps, and allows unforeseen and unpredictable situations to make me run up huge bills that could otherwise have been avoided with a proper tap.
- Nextgrid 5y ago
  The problem with the cloud is that the entire Internet is in control of your tap and can choose to open it and waste infinite amounts of water with no way to implement a cap.

by tpetry 5y ago

TedDoesntTalk 5y ago

> I am still waiting for a cloud without these dark patterns. This is how mobile and landline phone companies made enormous fortunes before flat rate billing. It’s called post-paid vs pre-paid billing.

iso1631 5y ago

Get a VPS from linode for $5 a month and it costs $5 a month.

nix23 5y ago
Or hetzner, or Vultr.
gkhartman 5y ago
They have transfer limits and an associated overage fee iirc. I can still see this sort of thing happening if that is the case.
- iso1631 5y ago
  My understanding is you hit your bandwidth cap and that's it, no more bandwidth. (edit) looks like that's not the case, I'm sure I used to have to buy a second instance a few years ago if I did want to use more bandwidth that was allocated
- BenjiWiebe 5y ago
  I barely even realized that, since my hobby stuff doesn't come anywhere near the limit. For those curious, the overage rate is $10/TB ($0.01/GB) after the transfer included in the plan. The smallest amount of included transfer is 1TB for the $5/mo VPS.
  - Ostrogodsky 5y ago
    Or just go with Hetzner and have a limit 20X as big with cheaper prices https://www.hetzner.com/cloud https://www.hetzner.com/cloud
tpetry 5y ago
Sure that's what i am doing. A beefy dedicated machine with no bandwidth pricing. But that also means i need to do everything by my own. I don't get any of the worry-free services of AWS.
- iso1631 5y ago
  Like the $10k/day bills? Odd definition of 'worry free'
- nojito 5y ago
  How is surprise billing not a worry?
- christophilus 5y ago
  I worry far less about my Netcup servers + BunnyCDN than I ever did about my AWS bills.
ozim 5y ago
Not really as there is network traffic quota: If you use up your monthly network transfer pool, you can continue to use your Linodes normally. That being said, you will be charged $0.01 for each additional GB at the end of your billing cycle.
hkt 5y ago
Personally I like Mythic Beasts and use their raspberry pi servers and VPSes. Much less terrifying pricing and the support is good too.
- tome 5y ago
  Yes, their support is amazing. I can email the support address and have a real human who knows what he/she is doing reply within minutes or hours at most.
  - hkt 5y ago
    Exactly! It is quite refreshing to not have to battle past first line to find someone with the understanding to help. No shibboleth required. Cheaper hosting, too.

nix23 5y ago

>Every cloud makes this mistake easy! Funny enough...Oracle (OCI) makes it better, you can buy oracle"coins" 1to1 with $ and load your account just with what you think you need.

christophilus 5y ago
If Oracle cloud is still shenanigan free in 2 decades, I’ll consider it. Until then, Oracle gets $0 of any budget I’m in charge of.
- nix23 5y ago
  See you when your a even more inflexible (and old) guy who makes the bet on one horse, look i give a *hit about (or anyone else) oracle, what i care for is migration without problems from one provider to another. Hard requirement: My image can run on it (freebsd and linux), no proprietary BS, no special stuff, give me vm-"harware" make it fast, make it cheap, make it reliable, that's it..that's it. And ATM i like oracle hetzner and vultr at most. If one of those change to my disgust i change, no big deal...just some dns rewrite.
- Nextgrid 5y ago
  The Oracle cloud UI is extremely slow and terrible to work with. I'd prefer shenanigans every so often than having to deal with that crap on a daily basis.
  - nix23 5y ago
    Kind of funny, for me it's faster then Amazon.

harry8 5y ago

Dark patterns - this sounds like a colour scheme you don't care for. "Predatory death-trap pricing" captures the spirit of the thing with rather more clarity. It is wholly intentional after all.

gwd 5y ago
> Dark patterns - this sounds like a colour scheme you don't care for. Or craft clothing for goths? But the "dark" comes from its association with evil: "Defense against the Dark Arts", "The Dark Lord", "Turn to the Dark Side of the Force". It's a clear implication that the people are "selling their souls to the devil": knowingly doing something "a little bit evil" to achieve their aims.
OrderlyTiamat 5y ago
> Dark patterns - this sounds like a colour scheme you don't care for. I can see your point- if I'd never seen the term before I might have a similar reaction. But it's quite a common term now I think.
- harry8 5y ago
  Not it is not. It is common industry jargon for people who work with websites. Nobody else knows what it is. If you had to pick a term to sound as inoffensive as possible for fraudulent, deceptive conduct while still sort of capturing the thing without being abjectly false you could do no better than something that sounds like a colourscheme. "Mr Politician what do you think about $big_co using dark patterns?" "Mr Politician what do you think about $big_co engaging in predatory death-trap pricing schemes to defraud consumers?" What is being asked in one of those questions is clear to everybody. The other is jargon and excludes the majority of the population from understanding the intended meaning. And note, you don't have to agree that it is "predatory death-trap pricing" at all. That is simply in the above sentence an accusation. Words have meanings. That the accusation be understood clearly by as many people as possible is important.
  - OrderlyTiamat 5y ago

Dave3of5 5y ago

Also the billing alerts is just that an alert. They should have something in place to put a hard cap on monthly spend. That way his free website would go offline when he's spent > $X. As you say they make it hard deliberately. Edit: Turn out Azure have this: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cost-management-billing/manage/spending-limit https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cost-management-billi...

fendy3002 5y ago
Eh after skimming it I feel like there's still gotchas with it. Not every account can turn it on and looks like there aren't custom limit. CMIIW, it'll be my first cloud provider if I can set one.
danuker 5y ago
I see there is a spending limit for the "intro" or "preview" plans designed for students, Visual Studio users, and resellers (the "hook" part in "hook, line, and sinker"). Not for actual cloud usage, like an actual pay-as-you-go plan where this would be useful. https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/support/legal/offer-details/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/support/legal/offer-detail...
- ghaff 5y ago
  Yeah, there are trial accounts and things but as far as I know, none of the big cloud providers have a way to say "Under no circumstances are you to charge me for than $X per month even if it means shutting down services."
- Dave3of5 5y ago
  Yeah I see that too I'll add that to my comment tbh I think what I said still stand it's been made hard or maybe said a different way is: It's very easy to overspend on these big cloud providers Oh I can't edit the comment now oh well sorry if I've confused anyone.
- Monotoko 5y ago
  A lot of Chinese cloud providers like Aliyun will only allow pay and go, because there’s no way to recursively bill My own instances go down all the time when I forget to ‘top up’ the account

dx034 5y ago

Hetzner's cloud offer is limited but they limit your possible spending by default and it's very easy to set up billing alerts. I guess they mostly do it to ensure they get the money at the end of the month, but it's equally useful for their users.

tpetry 5y ago
Additionally Hetzner's egress pricing is a lot more cheaper. On hetzenr you pay 1,19€/TB (1.13$/TB) vs. 90$/TB on AWS. That's about ~80 time more on AWS!

sgustard 5y ago

If I leave my water running then go on vacation I'll have a huge water bill too. I don't conclude my water company is intentionally trying to overcharge me. The more reasonable conclusion is: building an alert system that addresses every customer need is hard. Most enterprises (where all the customer focus is) want minimal downtime above other considerations, including cost.

addicted 5y ago
This is like you leaving your tap running slightly as you go on winter vacation so the pipes don’t freeze over. But the water company does not actually allow you to install proper taps to regulate the water so you use duct tape to do so, and due to an earthquake something falls on the tap causing your duct tape solution to fail leading to a massive surge of water, leading to your massive water bill. Did the water company cause this? No. Your duct tape solution wasn’t resilient enough because it didn’t factor in an earthquake. But I would be justifiably mad that my water company does not allow me to install actual taps, and allows unforeseen and unpredictable situations to make me run up huge bills that could otherwise have been avoided with a proper tap.
Nextgrid 5y ago
The problem with the cloud is that the entire Internet is in control of your tap and can choose to open it and waste infinite amounts of water with no way to implement a cap.