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Comment by patrec | Hacker News Reader

Which cloud or physical server hosting providers provide either user configurable hard spending limits or the option to (only) pre-pay? The big 3 cloud providers obviously don't, and neither does DO, I believe (you can pre-pay but not as your only payment option).

For personal hobby projects taking your chances on customer support goodwill in case you rack up a bill that would bankrupt you due to a wrong click seems kind of insane.

So what are good alternatives?

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Can't think of any, but managed hosting tends to do better. For instance if you are doing your testing in Ruby, I'd suggest hosting on Heroku while you do all your preliminary work, where it's clear(er) what the cost will be, then move to AWS later when the bank account is, well, beefier. :)

Bonkers! Surely there must be a market for this? Also, I get that the selling point of heroku is kind of AWS for dummies, so you are probably slightly less likely to mess up because of that, but it's still some auto-scale-this, click together-that kinda of service. As far as hosting models are concerned, getting a dedicated box and running the stuff you want seems far safer, no?

Agreed, it's a matter of degree. You can auto-scale up to a certain amount, at least in Heroku, so in practice you can limit it, say up to 8 servers or something, but nothing beats your own box if you can afford the opportunity cost.

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