Comment by dathinab | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dathinab | Hacker News Reader

> 2. Max monthly spend: unexpected traffic spikes happen, and the thought of spending an unbounded amount of money in a month is really uncomfortable. You can configure fly.io apps with a max monthly budget, we'll suspend them when they hit that budget, and then re-enable them at the beginning of the next month.

I like this, not having caps is a major problem with some of your competition for smaller projects/companies where the max caps are more important then availability.

I heard of more then one project which mad some mistake them self wrt. some code generating request in their client. Or had some other reason why they had insane usage spikes, causing them to basically go bankrupt in a mater of a view hours. Not even days. (Through one project got lucked out as if I remember correctly Amazone bailed them out to prevent bad press).

IMHO for the majority of server application availability is important but only up to a certain cost. After which unavailability for some time is better, even if you lose some customers. (Yes, like always there are exceptions).

I don't think I like the failure mode of your app getting slower (losing your ApplicationDN) right at the time it's really popular. I don't have a better solution though.

This is tricky since every app has different performance and budget constraints. We try to minimize footguns by starting with sensible defaults. Over time we'll provide more options so you can tune scaling and placement yourself. We're also happy to help if you need!

maybe if you go over, you automatically add ads to the page or something.

This would be terrible

Ads would be terrible but I'm really interested in the whole idea of "do something else when an app os over budget". I hadn't considered much except a 402 status code, which seems kinda mean: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status/402

A "donate" button when the current remaining budget would last for less than 100 minutes.

> I don't have a better solution though

Don't host in such a way that you're paying for traffic... Hetzner, OVH and Packet all have dedicated servers where you don't pay for the traffic, inbound or outbound.

Edit: judging by other comments here, it might seem like US zone of Fly.io is in fact hosted in Packet so they are probably themselves not paying for the traffic. Maybe they are using Hetzner for the EU zone (or OVH for that matter).

Packet charges for outbound bandwidth. The places you can get close to free on outbound bandwidth don’t give you the ability to do anycast and tend to over subscribe their networks.

We’d like to grt network prices down but we can’t run our service on ovh or Hetzner.

Vultr does BGP if you have a routable subnet and AS. Just open a support ticket.

Yep! We've been experimenting with Vultr, their physical servers are only in 7 cities. I hope they expand.

But your server going down because of high load instead of being shut down by a bill breaker doesn't make that much difference.

Unless your popularity pays your bills, it's the most graceful degradation you can have.

The solution is to set your limit pretty high (100 times your average or so) or, alternatively, have shorter limit intervals - 100 times your daily bill is still a lot less harmful than 100 times your monthly bill.

The only 'real' solution is proper alerting, but even then it's pretty easy to rack up a bill of several thousand dollar before anyone realizes what's going on.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com