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Comment by proteal | Hacker News Reader

One thing to keep in mind - if you accidentally run up a bill because of a mistake, there’s a good chance you can reach out to support and they will credit your account. $5k may be a lot to an individual, but the cloud provider’s costs for that service are significantly less and they shouldn’t mind forgiving the charge. Case in point, when the author deleted his account and switched providers, the old host didn’t chase him for the charges.

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That’s still a lot of hopes and prayers you do not end in financial ruin.

Instead, the cloud providers could offer prepaid credits/billing maximums to let individuals sleep at night. I would love to run my side project off of AWS to gain the experience, but no way I feel comfortable with a potentially unlimited liability because I configured something poorly. My joke project can take the uptime hit if it means I know that I will never spend more than $X to host it.

At least AWS sort of provides tooling to approximate this. I have some alerts setup in CloudWatch for anomalous Network Out, estimated charges exceeding a threshold, and a raw Network Out limit that if exceeded shuts instances down.

Overtime, bandwidth costs have gone down for AWS. What's finally causing me to think about jumping ship (surprised OP didn't mention OVH's unmetered stuff) is their upcoming pricing per month for IPv4 addresses. The alternative is proxying through CloudFlare, which I don't particularly want to do.

It's still absurd having to hand-craft that type of protection against racking up enormous bills, especially with cloud providers now actively promoting their various "free" tiers to hobbyists.

It reminds me of EU roaming before the regulatory cap, when a single video call close to the border could cost you thousands of Euros.

The thing is that GCP used to have this, but then got rid of it a couple years ago. So is there really demand for it in most of their customers?

Google killing a product cannot be used to assess popularity. Especially if the product’s existence would potentially hurt revenue.

It can certainly raise questions about popularity, however, as long as you also adequately consider their tendency for rent-seeking, monopolistic behavior, etc.

In this specific case it's more that I'm having a hard time picturing serious "cloud"-based web companies that decide "Oh yeah sure we'll just shut our site down if we get too many visitors". That would mean this feature is useful primarily for hobbyists, which are more likely to be put off by (and react like they do to roaming phone charges to) uncapped costs (and also not a reliable source of revenue), weakening the revenue argument for removing the feature.

Yeah, again "sorta" "approximates".

AWS is famous for making those alerts hard to set and error-prone. Honestly, I don't understand why people (instead of large companies) use them at all.

I agree with you. I understand why a "shut down all services when this amount of money is spent" button shouldn't be enabled by default, but it should at least be an option.

This is a good reason to avoid Amazon and friends. They're set up to let you fail, and that makes them terrible companies to host your private products with.

GCP used to offer a simple type-a-number-here daily billing limit. For a small business or personal project you could even safely put it at something super low like $2/day (or much less), since their "Always Free" tier covered a decent amount of usage.

You can still do it, but they got rid of the special-cased Console setting and instead provided a migration snippet to programatically control it using one of their cloud run/automation features or another.

Ah, here's the page, I guess:

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

Configuring a cap:

https://cloud.google.com/billing/docs/how-to/notify#cap_disa...

That's been true during recent flush years, where money was cheap and nobody really cared, but there are signs all over the place that the attitude is changing. Everything that used to be free is being monetized and everything that was monetized is seeing increased prices.

We should expect that these sort of implicit affordances are being trimmed as well, or at least that they're likely to be soon.

Yeah, I rather suspect they'll be much less forgiving of this sort of thing in the future.

All that takes is a lean quarter and some MBA to coin a term for rookie mistake-windfalls, and they will come to feel entitled to revenue from it.

Bob, I see the collateral spend of your clients is down this quarter. Can we see that bump up a bit? Mmmmkay that would be great. Thanks. Good talk.

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