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> And since my amount is too large, they offer to discount to 5%, which means I still need to pay 5 thousand dollars. If they just reduce to 5% like that, it s
by dhaavi 3y ago
> And since my amount is too large, they offer to discount to 5%, which means I still need to pay 5 thousand dollars.
If they just reduce to 5% like that, it shows how disconnected this is from their real bandwidth cost. Really does feel like a scam.
- rafram 3y agoEh, I wouldn’t say that’s necessarily the case. AWS support, for example, tends to be really good about waiving charges for things that are clearly your mistake, like an unused instance that you forgot to turn off for a couple months. That’s not because hosting instances doesn’t actually cost Amazon anything! It’s because they want to keep you as a customer even if it loses them a bit of money right now. In the Netlify case, though, insisting that this person still pay 5% is downright insulting. I’m sure they’re taking a hit already - just waive the whole thing.
- toomuchtodo 3y agoOur AWS TAM says they don’t do this anymore, and we spend tens of millions of dollars with them annually. n=1, ymmv
- hnlmorg 3y agoYou presumably already have enterprise pricing discounts agreed though?
- toomuchtodo 3y agoYes, but nothing novel, and this is a recent development (within the last few weeks).
- hnlmorg 3y agoI wonder if you’ve hit some kind of internal limit. I don’t know if such things exist but I’ve noticed a pattern around how discounts and credits are allocated. I do feel your pain though. Managing AWS costs can be a full time job itself.
- gcbirzan 3y agoIs it, though? We've been getting a lot of pushback for months, even for things that weren't really completely our fault (and were made worse by the horrible lag of cost explorer), or even for things that were aws bugs. Maybe now it's official policy, but definitely it's been hard to get refunds for a while now. They were throwing tens of thousands of dollars of credits at us to just play with new services a year and a half ago.
- d1sxeyes 3y agoNowadays for customers spending millions of dollars you'd expect (at least, Amazon would expect) that the customer has a FinOps department who are already working on getting the most 'bang for their buck' out of what they're paying for and minimising their spend, and they would jump to another platform in a heartbeat if they thought they could save money. It's not unreasonable to think that you don't need to do these customers any favours to keep their business, because those customers are big enough to look after themselves. For smaller customers, the friendliness of customer support and the flexibility to help them if they make mistakes is much more likely to be a retention consideration. And who knows when a company spending 3 digits a month becomes a customer spending 6 digits a month? You want to be the provider of choice in case the company grows.
- Repulsion9513 3y agoAWS will save us so much money! We don't have to pay for people to look after hardware! ... just pay for people to set up AWS, and maintain AWS, and make sure we're not paying thousands extra for AWS...
- rafram 3y agoYeah, exactly. I’m talking “I got billed $15 for an instance I haven’t used for the last few months. Can you refund me?”, not “You guys mind writing off a million or two?”
- Johnny555 3y agoThat’s not because hosting instances doesn’t actually cost Amazon anything Except it doesn't cost them anything. The marginal cost of keeping your single instance running is $0 (unless they were 100% out of capacity and they could have sold that instance to someone else either at full price or spot price)
- johngladtj 3y agoElectricity costs money
- JW_00000 3y agoBut no electricity is used if your instance is up but idle.
- tsimionescu 3y agoWhat does "idle" mean? Both a Linux or Windows OS not running any active software will still do computation and even network traffic (disk cache wrangling, indexing, checking for updates, NTP clock syncing etc), and requires electricity to do so. It's very low cost, especially if its on a VM from a host that otherwise runs other VMs, but it's not 0. And if it happens to be the last VM preventing a hardware server from completely powering off, then it's actually quite far from 0.
- littlestymaar 3y agoThe electricity overhead of keeping an idle VM on an already running host is nearly zero though.
- tsimionescu 3y agoSure, but the electricity overhead of keeping one host running just to run an idle VM is not as trivial.
- littlestymaar 3y ago
- mewpmewp2 3y agoI would say it is a scam, because you can't set a budget limit.
- szundi 3y agoStunning
- onion2k 3y agoAWS support, for example, tends to be really good about waiving charges for things that are clearly your mistake, like an unused instance that you forgot to turn off for a couple months. This is an admission that their UX sucks and makes it hard to know what state your account is in and what you're paying for. They waive the fees because a few high profile cases of people paying thousands due to the AWS console being awful would drive a lot of customers away.
- littlecranky67 3y agoEspecially since they admit it was a DDoS attack. What I find outrageous is first that they charge for incomming traffic (which is often free with other providers), but also 55$ per 100GB. For comparisson, Hetzner charges you 1€ per 1TB of outgoing traffic while incoming is free.
- klaustopher 3y agoIf the attacker downloaded the 3,44mb audio file that OP mentioned, aren't we talking about outgoing traffic?
- esperent 3y agoEven so, on Hetzner it would have cost them a total of $164, with no discount. On Netlify it's over 500 times higher, apparently.
- mrtksn 3y ago>it shows how disconnected this is from their real bandwidth cost It's a value added service, they don't trade bandwidth as a commodity. Therefore unfair characterisation. Plus, if you dive deeper: Bandwidth doesn't cost anything because bandwidth is just about pulsing some light in some glass fiber and applying some minuscule voltage on some metal fiber.Okay, maybe it costs some amount of electricity but all this is just a business model for paying on capital expenditure through time share arrangements. People can have all kind of models for this, for example you can come together with others or pay it all by yourself to install the equipment and have free bandwidth for the lifetime of the equipment. It's all just arrangements to cover the capital investment and earn something on top of it. That's not a scam. A scam would be if they didn't account correctly for the timeshare usage or induce usage to boost payments.
- notpushkin 3y ago> they don't trade bandwidth as a commodity I really don't get your point. If you're a hosting provider, the very thing you're selling is bandwidth (and disk space). Everything else is a value added service.
- mrtksn 3y agoI disagree, they are not a colocation service that happens to rent servers. They are opinionated platform for deploying web applications in a specific way. The bandwidth happens to be a necessity to do that and also a useful metric for billing by usage.
- Voultapher 3y agoThey overcharge egress by about 500x https://getdeploying.com/reference/data-egress https://getdeploying.com/reference/data-egress. So even a reduction to 0.2% would habe been possible. Honestly don't understand why anyone feels comfortable overpaying so much. Especially when there is no configurable spending limit.
- oefrha 3y agoIt wouldn’t be possible for them. Netlify doesn’t own transit, so AWS needs to get their fat cut even if Netlify waives their fatter cut.
- tombolino 3y agono, they charge 6x according to that table. Because they are using aws
- callalex 3y agoNetlify is not paying anywhere near the sticker price for AWS traffic.
- PUSH_AX 3y agoSome quick back of napkin math says 190TB would cost about $12k in AWS cloudfront costs.
- boesboes 3y agoFYI: From my experience, if you do more the 20-25TB, you can get 75% off no questions asked.
- dbish 3y agoIf you’re regularly a large customer like that, seems like just moving to AWS directly would make the most sense right?
- arielcostas 3y agoAt that scale, probably. Especially since AWS would offer you discounts over their public prices too. Netlify et al probably stop making sense when they cost more than a few engineering hours and the cost of AWS, Azure or GCP