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Comment by Vaslo | Hacker News Reader

So question for the masses,

I’ve wanted to setup a personal account on Google cloud, azure etc and take advantage of free stuff but I am terrified something will happen and I’ll mess something up or someone will mess it up for me and I’ll be out hundreds on my credit card. Any suggestions here?

Great list.

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Meh, I hate the idea of individual devs signing up for clouds like AWS, GCP, or Azure. These are huge cost machines and are designed to serve fast moving startups and hulking enterprises. The best you can do is setup account limits and alerts.

The real answer is that if you have an understanding of networks and systems, then the cloud is just a data center with different considerations. Your company should be giving you resources like sandbox accounts that you can play in. This is how you'll really learn.

You can set up alerts and triggers, up to pulling the plug automatically. Not exactly for the faint of heart.

GCP

https://cloud.google.com/billing/docs/how-to/budgets-program...

AWS

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/awsaccountbilling/latest/aboutv2...

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2020/10/announcin...

I strongly recommend setting up and using virtual credit cards, you can use them to enforce spending limits and spend maximums. There are several services that allow this, for example my CC company supports them directly or there are several services that let you set them up backed by a debit card. That way, if your hosting provider overcharges you it'll just bounce.

Bills don't just magically go away if you refuse to pay them.

They do to a degree. Nobody's going to court over a $200 bounced charge that you could argue shouldn't have been there in the first place. Most services will just close your account and move on with their lives.

But in the current climate of big tech oligopoly, they don't have to take you to court to make your life miserable. They can simply ban you from their services and make your professional life much more difficult for the rest of your natural life.

When the pandemic hit, flights were cancelled, and refund requests were unanswered here in Canada, many were afraid of requesting a charge back through their credit card company. In a country with only two major airline companies and a size that is too vast to travel by land all the time, getting banned from one, if they choose to do it, would make one's life so much more difficult. Tech is not far from that in terms of oligopoly power.

They're not That Smart. A new email address and PO box is a new person.

Was there ever a precedent of an airline ban over a chargeback where a refund was warranted?

> A new email address and PO box is a new person.

Not to airlines, which have your full legal name, date of birth, and passport number on file.

Not to big tech either, which are in practice giant surveillance companies and have mastered the art of tracking everyone and anyone on- and offline.

> Was there ever a precedent of an airline ban over a chargeback where a refund was warranted?

I don't know. But many people would not have the time to research this to their satisfaction, nor would want to risk it and find out the answer the hard way.

This is a valid strategy, but some companies already disallow virtual/prepaid cards, Scaleway for example.

Is there a way to do this for people based in Africa? My cursory searches came up empty...

PayPal can provide virtual credit cards, if I remember correctly.

Set up a budget. At least Azure has those, and you can set whatever limit you want. If you hit the limit, the access will be cut off (and VMs shut down, etc). Your data will not be lost, though. When the new billing period rolls around, all will be back to normal.

I highly recommend something like this if you want to learn the cloud and do not have an employer to sponsor an account for you.

All these suggestions of using a throw-away CC number to avoid paying the bill are just unethical, IMO. No need to resort to those measures.

Be careful with that. On AWS, at least, you can get a massive bill before the limits kick in.

There have been horror stories posted here before.

Grab a revolut account. They're free, and they have a tool called 'digital temporary card' that is good for one use. After the card number is used, it's cycled.

Not affiliated, I'm in Aus and I use my temp card for anything I don't want to be ongoing. Doubles as a breach safeguard (my credit card involved in a DB dump doesn't matter if it was a one-off number).

There's other good reasons to use revolut but will save it :)

If you do something like this do NOT sign up for AWS or Google Cloud with your “main account” as a denied card can get your entire account lost.

Also, don't use virtual cards with Google Cloud. My old boss used his shiny new Apple Credit Card, which has a virtual number for non Apple Pay charges.

His entire account got locked out until he was finally about to get ahold of someone in billing to reverse it.

It was right around the time that this article: https://smartprivacy.io/learn/i-got-banned-from-google-ads-f... was making the rounds.

Hasn't been my experience, but good to hear.

Based on stories from HN I would totally separate these accounts from any personal accounts. Even separate it project based. It any of them gets canceled, locked you shouldn't lose access to your personal mail or mobile phone.

I was on the free Redhat Open Cloud (rhcloud.com) for the years it existed. Thus I would never use the free Oracle cloud.

Since then I'm a happy free Heroku user, but also tried Azure, Google, AWS. Azure had the worst UI and features, but the others similar bad. Google also cannot be trusted for such a freebie, because of their random PM policies, Amazon forgot why. Both high risk to pay unexpectedly.

Buy a $25 Visa gift card, spend $20-ish of it elsewhere, and use that for the account. They may post a charge of $1 or so to initially confirm the card.

(I've had success with this in the past but apparently results can vary - some services may block a prepaid card)

Can only speak for AWS.

Don't do it, Amazon's whole shtick is having such opaque and illogical and convoluted pricing that you just throw your hands up and let it go.

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