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Comment by carlmr | Hacker News Reader

I guess we need regulation for this.

Why do we need regulation? "Keep the service up no matter what happens, no matter the cost" is a useful business model for companies that make the mistake of promising too many nines to their customers.

The issue at hand is that people put small websites on hosting providers designed for megacorporation wealth, like Netlify. I highly doubt the average blog needs more than a $10 VPS located in one single country without automatic fallback to another data centre. You can probably even go with a $5 VPS if you don't care about the first wave of HN front page bots not being able to reach your site.

> "Keep the service up no matter what happens, no matter the cost" is a useful business model

I mean, yeah - but that shouldn't be the default and it shouldn't be something that you can't opt out of if it is, which is what sounds like happened with Netlify.

Why would Netlify offer the option to opt out when extreme availability is their core business? I'd argue that people are using the wrong service provider if they need to opt out in the first place.

Same goes for most of the other pay-as-you-go providers that turn HN into billing support every now and then; very rarely do I see "we suddenly got a $20k bill" posts about services that these extreme availability products make sense for.

> You can probably even go with a $5 VPS...

You wouldn't believe the amount of times I've said this and the response was "but it costs me nothing right now"...

We don't need regulation for everything. Let customers vote with their wallet or even start a few lawsuits.

Adding more regulation makes the system slower.

Regulation is needed for lawsuits

I'd be in favour of a regulation to allow them to set a spend limit, opt-out.

I'm fine with their pricing structure right now, since you have PLENTY of providers to choose from - people can easily vote with their wallets and there's no problem that needs solving.

However, the unexpected spikes are a problem, and providers seemingly don't provide any way to solve them because they make more money by not solving them. A regulation to require all providers of post-billed services to provide spending limits would make a lot of sense.

Of course, customers should also have the option to opt out of the limit or set a very high limit.

This should apply to any service that's billed by usage calculated afterwards, not just web hosting, and not just technology.

Microsoft is the only cloud provider with a spending limit. One choice is not competition. That's why regulation is needed.

Vercel offers spend limits: https://vercel.com/blog/introducing-spend-management-realtim...

Or, rather than creating more regulations, people could read the contracts they agree to when they get service, and use a competitor if they don't like it

Yeah exactly why we need regulation - so contracts aren’t 100 pages long. DRY.

So, go to a different provider?

More like don't start a business at all because of provider risk.

Or use a provider with a predictable cost structure. There are PLENTY. You didn't need to choose this exact one.

The problem is that it isn't entirely clear which ones have predictable cost to the non-lawyers eye. I.e. they should have to have sane defaults, like reasonable spending limits and opt-out, by regulation, since the market is failing here.

It was clear though. Does Netlify not tell you their bandwidth pricing?

I don't know many people knowledgeable enough to read and understand legalese. Except lawyers ofc.

There is such a thing as an unfair contract. Moreover, there are business practices that can become a local maxima in an industry and squeeze out competition which would actually be a net benefit to most consumers. Mobile roaming was the same before the EU intervened, and were now going back to the shitshow tjat preceded it in the uk.

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