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I’ve been a netlify user since 2017 and I just deleted all my sites. I can’t risk receiving a $100k bill for toy projects. Your “current policy” is not good eno

by valine 3y ago

I’ve been a netlify user since 2017 and I just deleted all my sites. I can’t risk receiving a $100k bill for toy projects. Your “current policy” is not good enough.

erremerre 3y ago
Same boat here. the fact that once it arrives to the limits does not display an error page. At this point I honestly do not care about they changing their policy, they should have thought that a normal person receiving a 100000$ bill on a free tier shall not been at all on the table in any circumstance, even if they forgive the bill, nobody needs to stress out like that.
jug 3y ago
I agree and also delete my account. The only "fix" here is to act like Hetzner and null route upon DDoS, price cap the thing, or offer unlimited bandwidth on the free tier like e.g. Cloudflare Pages. Uncapped but paid is a recipe for disaster and you'll always be subject to the will of the support staff when something happens. If they can grasp to a straw leading to suspicions that it's not in fact a DDoS attack, you can for example be sure they'll do just that. Just no.
- livrem 3y ago
  How does price caps work on Hetzner? I never managed to figure that out from reading their price lists. It looks to me like they charge for each TB, and the only thing I can see is that you can set an email alert to go off when close to some threshold?
  - Hetzner_OL 3y ago
    Traffic limits change depending on our products: See https://docs.hetzner.com/robot/general/traffic/ https://docs.hetzner.com/robot/general/traffic/ 1) dedicated servers: unlimited 2) cloud servers: changes based on package 3) colocation: changes based on product 4) managed servers: unlimited 5) managed vServers: 20 TB 6) Storage Boxes: unlimited We only calculate outgoing traffic. We do not count incoming and internal traffic. --Katie
- zrn900 3y ago
  Hetzner dedicated servers are (true) unmetered with 1 gbit connection. (can be upgraded). https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/matrix-ax/ https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/matrix-ax/ With a 48 core Epyc or 80 core arm server, one really shouldnt need much more for a middling project. There are enterprises who run entire services on such hardware.
turtles3 3y ago
Same, as it stands you the user are legally liable for the full bill unless netlify graciously forgive it. Even in op's case, they didn't (still charging 5k!). If there was an option to cap billing, or at least some legally binding limit on liability, then I can countenance using netlify. Until then, it's just not feasible nor worth the risk.
ks2048 3y ago
Same. I'm looking at alternatives to get off netlify ASAP.
- herbst 3y ago
  Any cheap VPS and nginx should work for 99% of their customer base I guess. If you want easy deploy for static or dynamic just use git hooks.
  - ryandrake 3y ago
    I've run all of my hobby projects, including personal web pages, a Wordpress site that serves a local club, a small single-JS web app, and E-mail hosting for my family and a few other domains, on a single $5/mo VPS, and have never received a bill higher than $5 for the past, I don't know... 15 years. If your web site makes you money in proportion to the amount of views or bandwidth you use, by all means, go with a provider that increases your costs when your traffic rises. But if your web site does not make you money, why not host it somewhere for a flat rate?
    - herbst 3y ago
      I don't get that either. I earn all my money from my websites and serve > 1mio requests daily all from a single Vultr instance for less than $150 including backups and more traffic than I ever need. With monitoring, CDN, DNS, ddos protection, and whatever I pay about $200 a month, no surprised and a lot of room to grow or get HN hugged, or whatever. I've been on a $25 instance for years for all my sites, which worked as well.
- jotaen 3y ago
  For static sites, I’m quite happy with Cloudflare Pages + Github deploy action. (https://github.com/cloudflare/pages-action https://github.com/cloudflare/pages-action)
  - lobsterthief 3y ago
    Thanks, I have 3 sites I need to get off Netlify and I’ve spent the morning reading about Cloudflare Pages. My only hesitation is the 20k file limit; one of our sites is a large Gatsby site that generates certain content programmatically, sometimes using a series of YAML files as the source. Pretty sure we’re over 20k pages by themselves. Been meaning to move this one to Next.js sometime but that’s not on our roadmap anytime soon.
eric_cc 3y ago
Same. Toy project and it’s not worth the risk of using netlify. What’s a good, simple alternative for a VueJS app?
- geon 3y ago
  Github pages.
- victorbjorklund 3y ago
  Cloudflare pages is pretty much drop in for netlify. And it has unlimited bandwidth for free (at least in theory. Guess they might call you if your site does 1 petabyte per hour)
- lelanthran 3y ago
  > What’s a good, simple alternative for a VueJS app? I'm not sure about VueJS specifically, but I run everything I can off a $6/m digital ocean droplet (static sites, web apps, git repos, RDBMS, some other custom apps I've written) and it hasn't broken a sweat yet[1]. My understanding used to be that requests will be dropped if my virtual server can't handle it, and I'll have to transfer 10,000TB to get to a $100,000 bill. In practice, my server will not physically handle the load to serve more than maybe $1000 of data a month; it will fall over before that. In summary, using a VPS is sorta like an instant hard cap. [1] Until I tried using Jenkins. Which crashed constantly because apparently 512GB of RAM is too little for what it does. I'm now in the process of writing my own little CD tool that isn't going to go over 30MB of RAM just to run my deployment scripts.
  - icelain 3y ago
    Having a personal VPS is the way. I run a SvelteJS app as well as my personal website, blog and a couple other services on a $6 droplet and it runs great.
    - listenallyall 3y ago
      I agree with both of your philosophies and also run a VPS. However, lots of people would have no idea how to manage a server from scratch or to install a web server, even a static one. Netlify really is pretty amazingly simple for what it offers, which is a lot. And even among those who think they can run a server, many probably have wide open security holes they are oblivious to.
jcalx 3y ago
Same. I will (almost certainly) never incur a $104k bill, but switching to Cloudfare Pages looks free and I don't want to depend on unwritten policies of goodwill to mitigate the potential risk.
listenallyall 3y ago
Starting to wonder if this whole thing was an elaborate ploy by Netlify to cull the herd of longstanding, non-paying accounts.
JasonSage 3y ago
Couldn't have worded it any better. I did the same last night from my phone. My personal site and a project docs site are just going to not be online for a couple days. Easy choice.
epiccoleman 3y ago
Same here. Will I ever get a level of traffic that would cause this problem? Extremely doubtful. Is it worth the risk when Cloudflare Pages is a similarly easy offering, and took 5 minutes to switch to? Hell no.
fetzu 3y ago
Did exactly the same, moving everything over to Cloudflare took me less than 15 minutes. “We’ll forgive those cases, pinky swear” is not a valid excuse when putting (even opt-in) hard limits in place is technically viable.

by valine 3y ago

I’ve been a netlify user since 2017 and I just deleted all my sites. I can’t risk receiving a $100k bill for toy projects. Your “current policy” is not good enough.

erremerre 3y ago

Same boat here. the fact that once it arrives to the limits does not display an error page. At this point I honestly do not care about they changing their policy, they should have thought that a normal person receiving a 100000$ bill on a free tier shall not been at all on the table in any circumstance, even if they forgive the bill, nobody needs to stress out like that.

jug 3y ago

I agree and also delete my account. The only "fix" here is to act like Hetzner and null route upon DDoS, price cap the thing, or offer unlimited bandwidth on the free tier like e.g. Cloudflare Pages. Uncapped but paid is a recipe for disaster and you'll always be subject to the will of the support staff when something happens. If they can grasp to a straw leading to suspicions that it's not in fact a DDoS attack, you can for example be sure they'll do just that. Just no.

livrem 3y ago
How does price caps work on Hetzner? I never managed to figure that out from reading their price lists. It looks to me like they charge for each TB, and the only thing I can see is that you can set an email alert to go off when close to some threshold?
- Hetzner_OL 3y ago
  Traffic limits change depending on our products: See https://docs.hetzner.com/robot/general/traffic/ https://docs.hetzner.com/robot/general/traffic/ 1) dedicated servers: unlimited 2) cloud servers: changes based on package 3) colocation: changes based on product 4) managed servers: unlimited 5) managed vServers: 20 TB 6) Storage Boxes: unlimited We only calculate outgoing traffic. We do not count incoming and internal traffic. --Katie
zrn900 3y ago
Hetzner dedicated servers are (true) unmetered with 1 gbit connection. (can be upgraded). https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/matrix-ax/ https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/matrix-ax/ With a 48 core Epyc or 80 core arm server, one really shouldnt need much more for a middling project. There are enterprises who run entire services on such hardware.

turtles3 3y ago

Same, as it stands you the user are legally liable for the full bill unless netlify graciously forgive it. Even in op's case, they didn't (still charging 5k!). If there was an option to cap billing, or at least some legally binding limit on liability, then I can countenance using netlify. Until then, it's just not feasible nor worth the risk.

ks2048 3y ago

Same. I'm looking at alternatives to get off netlify ASAP.

herbst 3y ago
Any cheap VPS and nginx should work for 99% of their customer base I guess. If you want easy deploy for static or dynamic just use git hooks.
- ryandrake 3y ago
  I've run all of my hobby projects, including personal web pages, a Wordpress site that serves a local club, a small single-JS web app, and E-mail hosting for my family and a few other domains, on a single $5/mo VPS, and have never received a bill higher than $5 for the past, I don't know... 15 years. If your web site makes you money in proportion to the amount of views or bandwidth you use, by all means, go with a provider that increases your costs when your traffic rises. But if your web site does not make you money, why not host it somewhere for a flat rate?
  - herbst 3y ago
    I don't get that either. I earn all my money from my websites and serve > 1mio requests daily all from a single Vultr instance for less than $150 including backups and more traffic than I ever need. With monitoring, CDN, DNS, ddos protection, and whatever I pay about $200 a month, no surprised and a lot of room to grow or get HN hugged, or whatever. I've been on a $25 instance for years for all my sites, which worked as well.
jotaen 3y ago
For static sites, I’m quite happy with Cloudflare Pages + Github deploy action. (https://github.com/cloudflare/pages-action https://github.com/cloudflare/pages-action)
- lobsterthief 3y ago
  Thanks, I have 3 sites I need to get off Netlify and I’ve spent the morning reading about Cloudflare Pages. My only hesitation is the 20k file limit; one of our sites is a large Gatsby site that generates certain content programmatically, sometimes using a series of YAML files as the source. Pretty sure we’re over 20k pages by themselves. Been meaning to move this one to Next.js sometime but that’s not on our roadmap anytime soon.

eric_cc 3y ago

Same. Toy project and it’s not worth the risk of using netlify. What’s a good, simple alternative for a VueJS app?

geon 3y ago
Github pages.
victorbjorklund 3y ago
Cloudflare pages is pretty much drop in for netlify. And it has unlimited bandwidth for free (at least in theory. Guess they might call you if your site does 1 petabyte per hour)
lelanthran 3y ago
> What’s a good, simple alternative for a VueJS app? I'm not sure about VueJS specifically, but I run everything I can off a $6/m digital ocean droplet (static sites, web apps, git repos, RDBMS, some other custom apps I've written) and it hasn't broken a sweat yet[1]. My understanding used to be that requests will be dropped if my virtual server can't handle it, and I'll have to transfer 10,000TB to get to a $100,000 bill. In practice, my server will not physically handle the load to serve more than maybe $1000 of data a month; it will fall over before that. In summary, using a VPS is sorta like an instant hard cap. [1] Until I tried using Jenkins. Which crashed constantly because apparently 512GB of RAM is too little for what it does. I'm now in the process of writing my own little CD tool that isn't going to go over 30MB of RAM just to run my deployment scripts.
- icelain 3y ago
  Having a personal VPS is the way. I run a SvelteJS app as well as my personal website, blog and a couple other services on a $6 droplet and it runs great.
  - listenallyall 3y ago
    I agree with both of your philosophies and also run a VPS. However, lots of people would have no idea how to manage a server from scratch or to install a web server, even a static one. Netlify really is pretty amazingly simple for what it offers, which is a lot. And even among those who think they can run a server, many probably have wide open security holes they are oblivious to.

jcalx 3y ago

Same. I will (almost certainly) never incur a $104k bill, but switching to Cloudfare Pages looks free and I don't want to depend on unwritten policies of goodwill to mitigate the potential risk.

listenallyall 3y ago

Starting to wonder if this whole thing was an elaborate ploy by Netlify to cull the herd of longstanding, non-paying accounts.

JasonSage 3y ago

Couldn't have worded it any better. I did the same last night from my phone. My personal site and a project docs site are just going to not be online for a couple days. Easy choice.

epiccoleman 3y ago

Same here. Will I ever get a level of traffic that would cause this problem? Extremely doubtful. Is it worth the risk when Cloudflare Pages is a similarly easy offering, and took 5 minutes to switch to? Hell no.

fetzu 3y ago

Did exactly the same, moving everything over to Cloudflare took me less than 15 minutes. “We’ll forgive those cases, pinky swear” is not a valid excuse when putting (even opt-in) hard limits in place is technically viable.