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Comment by click170 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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