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Comment by marincounty | Hacker News Reader

They need to work on their security, but I've had three websites up for four years--for free. Never paid a cent. I don't think another hosting service can beat free.

I did have problems with one site, it was hijacked by someone with a .ru email. I needed to point my name servers elsewhere in order to get my account back. Yes, it was a problem, but their staff was not completely indifferent to my problem. I've experience worse.

I can't knock a free server. If they get their security problems worked out, I would consider paying them, and using them for a site I really cared about.

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There are many, way better and almost free alternatives. 3,49 euros/month for unlimited domains in bluehost for example. Free (with other kind of limits) heroku, a YC company. I don't see the price/risk of sites like 000webhost worth it anymore

Some of the ALMOST free alternatives do not get any better. I used lots of free services so that I do not have to concern that my credit card information will be compromised.

For things I need to declare ownership or critical, I turn to the brand well known vendors. Not for the reason that they do very well in security, but they have lots to lose. And they have a office in my jurisdiction I can hunt down.

AWS has a free tier as long as you don't go over limit. But obviously if you get DDoS, then your bill can go up.

Digital Ocean is a good one for $5 and pretty stable for me. If all you need is a static site, use github.

Prepaid credit cards are a very valuable tool for anyone using the AWS free tier of service. Its an extra layer of protection if you ever do get DDoS'd.

No, I don't care if it means amazon doesn't get paid for the bandwidth consumed by an attack. Sometimes all I care about is not getting a 10k or bigger bill at the end of the month for what was advertised as free. IMO they really need a way of automatically shutting down VMs that go over limit instead of just charging the credit card on file.

If it's your personal project, shove CloudFlare in front of the AWS site.

Also, they have http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/Developer... but like a lot of things with AWS, it's ridiculously complex.

Yeah, I understand that it's possible to configure alerts so that you are notified when your account goes overlimit, but for pet projects, I don't want to be notified and expected to respond, I want it to just stop the server. I don't see them ever actually implementing this though because it wouldn't bring in any additional revenue.

I don't see why you couldn't use the cloudwatch metric to just turn off all your instances if you go over budget.

Of course it would require you to set it up, but for the vast majority of companies that are on AWS, if they were to go over their budget, it would be worse to shut down the instances in that case...

Agreed that its hopelessly complex (one reason to just go with Digital Ocean or someone else with a and a pre-paid account billing type). That said: "You can add the stop, terminate, reboot, or recover actions to any alarm that is set on an Amazon EC2 per-instance metric, including basic and detailed monitoring metrics provided by Amazon CloudWatch (in the AWS/EC2 namespace), as well as any custom metrics that include the "InstanceId=" dimension, as long as the InstanceId value refers to a valid running Amazon EC2 instance."

Amazon'll still come after you for the balance, including collections. It's possible to set up billing alerts in CloudWatch - set them up at 50%, 100%, 150% and 200% of average monthly spend and it's hard to get too shocking of a surprise.

I thought AWS free tier is one year only?

Right, I assume it was a quick PoC. Good point.

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