4 ms·

Eh, 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

by rafram 3y ago

Eh, 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 ago
Our 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 ago
  You presumably already have enterprise pricing discounts agreed though?
  - toomuchtodo 3y ago
    Yes, but nothing novel, and this is a recent development (within the last few weeks).
    - hnlmorg 3y ago
      I 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 ago
      Is 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 ago
  Nowadays 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 ago
    AWS 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 ago
    Yeah, 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 ago
That’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 ago
  Electricity costs money
  - JW_00000 3y ago
    But no electricity is used if your instance is up but idle.
    - tsimionescu 3y ago
      What 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 ago
    The electricity overhead of keeping an idle VM on an already running host is nearly zero though.
    - tsimionescu 3y ago
      Sure, but the electricity overhead of keeping one host running just to run an idle VM is not as trivial.
      - littlestymaar 3y ago
mewpmewp2 3y ago
I would say it is a scam, because you can't set a budget limit.
- szundi 3y ago
  Stunning
onion2k 3y ago
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. 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.

by rafram 3y ago

toomuchtodo 3y ago

Our 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 ago
You presumably already have enterprise pricing discounts agreed though?
- toomuchtodo 3y ago
  Yes, but nothing novel, and this is a recent development (within the last few weeks).
  - hnlmorg 3y ago
    I 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 ago
    Is 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 ago
Nowadays 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 ago
  AWS 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 ago
  Yeah, 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 ago

That’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 ago
Electricity costs money
- JW_00000 3y ago
  But no electricity is used if your instance is up but idle.
  - tsimionescu 3y ago
    What 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 ago
  The electricity overhead of keeping an idle VM on an already running host is nearly zero though.
  - tsimionescu 3y ago
    Sure, but the electricity overhead of keeping one host running just to run an idle VM is not as trivial.
    - littlestymaar 3y ago

mewpmewp2 3y ago

I would say it is a scam, because you can't set a budget limit.

szundi 3y ago
Stunning

onion2k 3y ago

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. 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.