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Comment by sasasassy | Hacker News Reader

I personally feel many things in AWS are purposely made in order to hide the real costs from you.

For instance how you are charged for S3 traffic your buckets receive even if you don't have any files there. Or how traffic between zones that is outside of your control is still charged. Or how things like AZ replication cost a ton and you have no metric to show if it even makes sense to enable them. Heck, even usage alerts cost money.

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S3 traffic cost is a funny topic. I remember ~3 years ago we had an issue with AWS, where they kept charging us for web traffic to an S3 bucket we deleted. When we complained, their response was like: Well, then stop sending traffic to that (non-existing) bucket. That of course wasn't going to happen as the URL was out in the wild and got requested quite often automatically by third-party services.

Did you not control the DNS for that hostname? Not supporting AWS' stance, but you should always maintain control of your traffic flow using DNS. Reverse proxying is the latest hype for SEO juice (blog.somewhere.com->somewhere.com/blog), but subdomains are the bees knees when you need to point traffic somewhere else on demand.

Back then we already had the bucket for a few years and the person who set it up probably didn't think about the implications and simply chose to use the AWS-provided bucket URL.

And that person isn't alone. If you look around, you'll find a lot of services on the internet which directly link to S3 buckets using thee AWS-provided endpoints.

You don't know what you don't know. That's the danger.

A tool my company always pulled data from was depreciated and the web ui and api got shutdown. They used the awe bucket url though for the web ui downloads and those had predictable url patterns. Turns out they didn’t stop generating the data we needed, so we still just go straight to their urls.

If someone has the aws bucket name they only need to form the s3.amazonaws.com url and still request it.

You can restrict access to a bucket so it only goes through a CloudFront url that you control.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudFront/latest/Develope...

If you cancelled your AWS account entirely, but people were still trying to reach that deleted S3 bucket, who would pay for that?

Yeah, when we needed to move our download servers from Rackspace (~15TB/month) after they canceled sponsorship for OSS projects... S3 costs didn't look reasonable.

Went with a small cluster of cheapo ARM64 scaleway servers (no bandwidth billing), which costs us ~15 Euro a month.

Much better than the likely ~$US1.5k with S3 just for transfer costs alone.

Yeah S3 traffic bills are always surprising. It’s probably 2x or even 3x more than the actual storage cost for our use case. And we have caching mechanisms on our end.

> For instance how you are charged for S3 traffic your buckets receive even if you don't have any files there. Or how traffic between zones that is outside of your control is still charged.

Can you say a bit more about these two things? When do you get charged for s3 traffic on a bucket with no files? What do you define as uncontrollable cross zone traffic here?

Maybe they mean something else but I expect a GET request is $0.0004 per 1,000 requests (i.e. $0.40 per million requests) regardless of whether it returns a file (200) or not (404). Sounds more like a nuisance than a financial risk.

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