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One thing to keep in mind - if you accidentally run up a bill because of a mistake, there’s a good chance you can reach out to support and they will credit your

One thing to keep in mind - if you accidentally run up a bill because of a mistake, there’s a good chance you can reach out to support and they will credit your account. $5k may be a lot to an individual, but the cloud provider’s costs for that service are significantly less and they shouldn’t mind forgiving the charge. Case in point, when the author deleted his account and switched providers, the old host didn’t chase him for the charges.

swatcoder 3y ago
That's been true during recent flush years, where money was cheap and nobody really cared, but there are signs all over the place that the attitude is changing. Everything that used to be free is being monetized and everything that was monetized is seeing increased prices. We should expect that these sort of implicit affordances are being trimmed as well, or at least that they're likely to be soon.
- _jal 3y ago
  Yeah, I rather suspect they'll be much less forgiving of this sort of thing in the future. All that takes is a lean quarter and some MBA to coin a term for rookie mistake-windfalls, and they will come to feel entitled to revenue from it.
  - bcrosby95 3y ago
    Bob, I see the collateral spend of your clients is down this quarter. Can we see that bump up a bit? Mmmmkay that would be great. Thanks. Good talk.
0cf8612b2e1e 3y ago
That’s still a lot of hopes and prayers you do not end in financial ruin. Instead, the cloud providers could offer prepaid credits/billing maximums to let individuals sleep at night. I would love to run my side project off of AWS to gain the experience, but no way I feel comfortable with a potentially unlimited liability because I configured something poorly. My joke project can take the uptime hit if it means I know that I will never spend more than $X to host it.
- Jach 3y ago
  At least AWS sort of provides tooling to approximate this. I have some alerts setup in CloudWatch for anomalous Network Out, estimated charges exceeding a threshold, and a raw Network Out limit that if exceeded shuts instances down. Overtime, bandwidth costs have gone down for AWS. What's finally causing me to think about jumping ship (surprised OP didn't mention OVH's unmetered stuff) is their upcoming pricing per month for IPv4 addresses. The alternative is proxying through CloudFlare, which I don't particularly want to do.
  - lxgr 3y ago
    It's still absurd having to hand-craft that type of protection against racking up enormous bills, especially with cloud providers now actively promoting their various "free" tiers to hobbyists. It reminds me of EU roaming before the regulatory cap, when a single video call close to the border could cost you thousands of Euros.
    - Intralexical 3y ago
      The thing is that GCP used to have this, but then got rid of it a couple years ago. So is there really demand for it in most of their customers?
      - 0cf8612b2e1e 3y ago
        Google killing a product cannot be used to assess popularity. Especially if the product’s existence would potentially hurt revenue.
        Intralexical 3y ago
        It can certainly raise questions about popularity, however, as long as you also adequately consider their tendency for rent-seeking, monopolistic behavior, etc. In this specific case it's more that I'm having a hard time picturing serious "cloud"-based web companies that decide "Oh yeah sure we'll just shut our site down if we get too many visitors". That would mean this feature is useful primarily for hobbyists, which are more likely to be put off by (and react like they do to roaming phone charges to) uncapped costs (and also not a reliable source of revenue), weakening the revenue argument for removing the feature.

swatcoder 3y ago

That's been true during recent flush years, where money was cheap and nobody really cared, but there are signs all over the place that the attitude is changing. Everything that used to be free is being monetized and everything that was monetized is seeing increased prices. We should expect that these sort of implicit affordances are being trimmed as well, or at least that they're likely to be soon.

_jal 3y ago
Yeah, I rather suspect they'll be much less forgiving of this sort of thing in the future. All that takes is a lean quarter and some MBA to coin a term for rookie mistake-windfalls, and they will come to feel entitled to revenue from it.
- bcrosby95 3y ago
  Bob, I see the collateral spend of your clients is down this quarter. Can we see that bump up a bit? Mmmmkay that would be great. Thanks. Good talk.

0cf8612b2e1e 3y ago

That’s still a lot of hopes and prayers you do not end in financial ruin. Instead, the cloud providers could offer prepaid credits/billing maximums to let individuals sleep at night. I would love to run my side project off of AWS to gain the experience, but no way I feel comfortable with a potentially unlimited liability because I configured something poorly. My joke project can take the uptime hit if it means I know that I will never spend more than $X to host it.

Jach 3y ago
At least AWS sort of provides tooling to approximate this. I have some alerts setup in CloudWatch for anomalous Network Out, estimated charges exceeding a threshold, and a raw Network Out limit that if exceeded shuts instances down. Overtime, bandwidth costs have gone down for AWS. What's finally causing me to think about jumping ship (surprised OP didn't mention OVH's unmetered stuff) is their upcoming pricing per month for IPv4 addresses. The alternative is proxying through CloudFlare, which I don't particularly want to do.
- lxgr 3y ago
  It's still absurd having to hand-craft that type of protection against racking up enormous bills, especially with cloud providers now actively promoting their various "free" tiers to hobbyists. It reminds me of EU roaming before the regulatory cap, when a single video call close to the border could cost you thousands of Euros.
  - Intralexical 3y ago
    The thing is that GCP used to have this, but then got rid of it a couple years ago. So is there really demand for it in most of their customers?
    - 0cf8612b2e1e 3y ago
      Google killing a product cannot be used to assess popularity. Especially if the product’s existence would potentially hurt revenue.
      - Intralexical 3y ago
        It can certainly raise questions about popularity, however, as long as you also adequately consider their tendency for rent-seeking, monopolistic behavior, etc. In this specific case it's more that I'm having a hard time picturing serious "cloud"-based web companies that decide "Oh yeah sure we'll just shut our site down if we get too many visitors". That would mean this feature is useful primarily for hobbyists, which are more likely to be put off by (and react like they do to roaming phone charges to) uncapped costs (and also not a reliable source of revenue), weakening the revenue argument for removing the feature.