13 ms·

I really, really wish there was just a way to put a hard limit on how much a cloud could charge me. I am never going to want to spend 200k of my personal money

I really, really wish there was just a way to put a hard limit on how much a cloud could charge me. I am never going to want to spend 200k of my personal money on some project on a cloud. Never. I don't even want my ant-based basket viewing project simulator to cost me 1 thousand dollars because it went viral and all clouds overcharge for bandwith. Just let me put in a limit.

cube2222 2y ago
I think this sounds easy, but it’s actually quite nontrivial in practice. You need special handling of such a limit for each kind of resource. E.g. when my limit is reached to they remove the database, along with all backups, and all objects on S3? Since storage is billed, it should also be stopped when the limit is reached, right? I think in practice among companies paying most of their revenue, there’d be zero interest in this, while it would be a lot of effort to implement. This is really something specific to hobby projects, which just shouldn’t be using those “unlimited potential cost” services.
- candiddevmike 2y ago
  I don't think any of these requirements are necessary. A basic "if I reach my bill limit, turn off things that are billing" toggle would suffice for 80%+ of users, especially with better billing controls/per-team billing accounts. I think you run into more problems/user frustrations with a tenuous conditional-shut-off approach. My tinfoil hat is that a lot of cloud billing is accidental, probably from "lab environments", and they don't want to provide a way to budget/limit these.
  - tptacek 2y ago
    The whole post is about this accidental billing situation.
  - cube2222 2y ago
    I mean, those S3 objects, those backups, those databases, are billing. “Turning them off” means deleting them.
    - candiddevmike 2y ago
      Sounds good to me, that's what offsite backups are for (if the data is even necessary)
    - jabbany 2y ago
      It doesn't have to be though? The provider could reject further access to them (reads / writes) once the limit is reached. The cost of actually keeping objects as "cold" storage has a natural cap per billing cycle since those are billed based on time.
  - bee_rider 2y ago
    What if my bug was saving, like, way more data to the cloud than I expected, and suddenly having a big bill for the hard drive space my data is using up just sitting there? It would be a pretty dumb bug, but hey, you never know, right? In that case they have to choose to either delete my data or keep charging me, so I guess there isn’t an easy zero-cost “stop” option.
- HeatrayEnjoyer 2y ago
  It there was a law about this companies would find a way. Where there's any uncertainty they can simply eat those edge costs, the extremely fat profit margins cover it easily.
mappu 2y ago
You might be happier with a fixed-size VPS, instead of a cloud provider,
- pocketarc 2y ago
  I started writing this comment by saying: Exactly - the whole point of a cloud provider is scalability. If you're doing a personal hobby project, get off big scalable clouds and get yourself one (or multiple!) fixed-price VPS or dedicated servers. But as I think of it, I think what people really want, for hobby projects, is not so much the scalability, but the managed offerings. They want zero-ops, zero-maintenance, zero-server-updates hosting, with a fixed price and hard limits. It won't be infinitely scalable, but it doesn't need to be - it's a hobby project. They just don't wanna sysadmin a server of their own. Which is completely understandable. There's room in the market for something like this.
  - spencerchubb 2y ago
    If you want a server that's fixed cost and zero maintenance, I recommend replit.
  - genewitch 2y ago
    We tried this. I was tasked with automating popular software installs into fresh VMs. I think some of my scripts for doing so are on my github - wordpress and some dashboard software, at least. offerings were published on the main page and afaik no takers. We migrated off whatever hypervisor we were using onto wok/kimchi and finally to proxmox, so my scripts still work, but proxmox has turnkey linux "quickstart" servers now as well as lxd, so there's less reason to use my scripts.
  - CaptainFever 2y ago
    An important part of hobby projects is the scaling to zero part too. I wager a lot of hobby projects use cloud simply because it's free or almost free (e.g. 2 cents a month), which isn't the case if you rent a VPS.
- tomjen3 2y ago
commercialnix 2y ago
Would you be interested in a cloud provider that did not charge for inbound or responding (outbound in response) bandwidth?
- tomjen3 2y ago
  Yes. Very much so. Or at least one that charged SANE rates. I get 100 mb outbound on my resident ISP, and that is unmetered, but clouds that sit almost directly on the backbone somehow charge a nontrivial amount of dollars per GB of bandwidth. I only know of Hertzner.

cube2222 2y ago

I think this sounds easy, but it’s actually quite nontrivial in practice. You need special handling of such a limit for each kind of resource. E.g. when my limit is reached to they remove the database, along with all backups, and all objects on S3? Since storage is billed, it should also be stopped when the limit is reached, right? I think in practice among companies paying most of their revenue, there’d be zero interest in this, while it would be a lot of effort to implement. This is really something specific to hobby projects, which just shouldn’t be using those “unlimited potential cost” services.

candiddevmike 2y ago
I don't think any of these requirements are necessary. A basic "if I reach my bill limit, turn off things that are billing" toggle would suffice for 80%+ of users, especially with better billing controls/per-team billing accounts. I think you run into more problems/user frustrations with a tenuous conditional-shut-off approach. My tinfoil hat is that a lot of cloud billing is accidental, probably from "lab environments", and they don't want to provide a way to budget/limit these.
- tptacek 2y ago
  The whole post is about this accidental billing situation.
- cube2222 2y ago
  I mean, those S3 objects, those backups, those databases, are billing. “Turning them off” means deleting them.
  - candiddevmike 2y ago
    Sounds good to me, that's what offsite backups are for (if the data is even necessary)
  - jabbany 2y ago
    It doesn't have to be though? The provider could reject further access to them (reads / writes) once the limit is reached. The cost of actually keeping objects as "cold" storage has a natural cap per billing cycle since those are billed based on time.
- bee_rider 2y ago
  What if my bug was saving, like, way more data to the cloud than I expected, and suddenly having a big bill for the hard drive space my data is using up just sitting there? It would be a pretty dumb bug, but hey, you never know, right? In that case they have to choose to either delete my data or keep charging me, so I guess there isn’t an easy zero-cost “stop” option.
HeatrayEnjoyer 2y ago
It there was a law about this companies would find a way. Where there's any uncertainty they can simply eat those edge costs, the extremely fat profit margins cover it easily.

mappu 2y ago

You might be happier with a fixed-size VPS, instead of a cloud provider,

pocketarc 2y ago
I started writing this comment by saying: Exactly - the whole point of a cloud provider is scalability. If you're doing a personal hobby project, get off big scalable clouds and get yourself one (or multiple!) fixed-price VPS or dedicated servers. But as I think of it, I think what people really want, for hobby projects, is not so much the scalability, but the managed offerings. They want zero-ops, zero-maintenance, zero-server-updates hosting, with a fixed price and hard limits. It won't be infinitely scalable, but it doesn't need to be - it's a hobby project. They just don't wanna sysadmin a server of their own. Which is completely understandable. There's room in the market for something like this.
- spencerchubb 2y ago
  If you want a server that's fixed cost and zero maintenance, I recommend replit.
- genewitch 2y ago
  We tried this. I was tasked with automating popular software installs into fresh VMs. I think some of my scripts for doing so are on my github - wordpress and some dashboard software, at least. offerings were published on the main page and afaik no takers. We migrated off whatever hypervisor we were using onto wok/kimchi and finally to proxmox, so my scripts still work, but proxmox has turnkey linux "quickstart" servers now as well as lxd, so there's less reason to use my scripts.
- CaptainFever 2y ago
  An important part of hobby projects is the scaling to zero part too. I wager a lot of hobby projects use cloud simply because it's free or almost free (e.g. 2 cents a month), which isn't the case if you rent a VPS.
tomjen3 2y ago

commercialnix 2y ago

Would you be interested in a cloud provider that did not charge for inbound or responding (outbound in response) bandwidth?

tomjen3 2y ago
Yes. Very much so. Or at least one that charged SANE rates. I get 100 mb outbound on my resident ISP, and that is unmetered, but clouds that sit almost directly on the backbone somehow charge a nontrivial amount of dollars per GB of bandwidth. I only know of Hertzner.