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Comment by crooked-v | Hacker News Reader

Also see the Netlify comment thread linked from one of the Reddit posts (https://answers.netlify.com/t/limit-bandwidth-to-avoid-high-...), where one of their representatives specifically says that if you suffer a DDOS they will do nothing to stop you from getting a bajillion-dollar bandwidth bill, even if you're on the "free" tier.

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That's my favorite thing about all these services. None of them have an equivalent of a stop-loss. They'll notify you IF you setup an alert, but that's it. Often times the alerts are way after the damage is done, with some billable metrics often lagging in reporting/alerting by hours. The default should be safe with easy options to increase the limits.

oooh i really like that stop loss example. having a netlify serverless website is basically selling a put option without receiving any premium.

The premium is the website itself ;D Still, potentially unlimited costs is wayy too much risk.

Selling a put has a fixed downside, so perhaps selling a naked call would be more appropriate? Unlimited loss potential! :^)

You can totally build a GCP function that will tear down your site if a billing alert hits the pubsub bus, but you can also set billing caps for a bunch of the APIs.

Why not add it directly into the interface where you configure the site to begin with? It's a pretty reasonable ask.

I don't really know although I can make up an answer but it contradicts

> None of them have an equivalent of a stop-loss.

Cynically, it's because they want to take your money. Practically, it's because a company that breaks your thing because you didn't pay, even if you asked it to, just isn't going to be a popular move.

It takes real leadership to back a product feature like this. That's why.

It's probably quite difficult to boil it down to something as simple as an "off" switch that'll limit costs for them, meaningfully work for all services, not be abused, not be confusing, and not result in the customers that actually make you money accidentally getting important things shut off unexpectedly under predictable circumstances.

It's probably easier to make it so they can set up alerts and have a human on their end evaluate what steps are worth taking to cut costs while maintaining important availability.

From what I can tell Azure has more robust stop-loss options. But business considerations for the provider aside, there are absolutely tradeoffs between reliably limiting your spend and avoiding taking a business down because of a legitimate spike.

Absolutely but that tradeoff should be for the customer to make.

What you're saying is that I can build a cost control function, not that GCP has one.

Yes. GP's claim is there is no stop procedure. just because it's not a simple toggle switch doesn't mean it's not there.

I remember trying AWS Glacier as a broke university student, thinking it was a cheap way to back up my data. I was wrong.

A decade later I played around with AWS, set up a free 1-core VPS. It was fine for a year or so (I ended up not using it at all), and suddenly I got a bill. It wasn't much, but it reminded me how these services make it very hard to be aware of your bills until you get them.

I was trying out Azure recently, and I found it too confusing to make any sort of quick risk assessment.

It's clearly just for people for whom "What's the worst that could happen?" is always a rethorical question.

Glacier IS a cheap way to backup data, in fact the cheapest of you ignore the scam "$200 for life" type things. It's about $1 per TB per month.

It's not cheap to restore though, at about $90 minimum per TB.

So it's best as part of a 3-2-1 system, not for frequent restores.

Lambda and GCP Cloud Functions do have cost controls. You can specify the maximum number of instances that can be spun up at any given point.

I think the UX can make it more friendly to specify the types of traffic and cost you’re expecting but most erroneous spikes are the result of a customer misconfiguration or a legitimate spike in traffic.

It’s the former which are problematic for customers. They can request a credit and we (GCP) try and accommodate.

It’s not a feature designed for profit. But it also tends to fall below the cut line for prioritization to fix. But it’s in the backlog and doesn’t go unnoticed.

(Former PM on GCP Cloud Functions)

Do users setup cost controls before activating the service? Or is this something they need to know how to do and do on their own?

Separate from billing, the product-native cost controls which prevent over-consumption is configured at the resource level.

gcloud run deploy ..... --max-instances=N

What you really want is prepaid instead of post-paid billing. Charge up the account with $100, and stop working and delete my data if that gets hit, with an auto renew option to recharge some amount every month.

That seems a little reductive. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say, my current spend is ~13k a month. I should be able to set a 20k cap, such that non fixed billable like bandwidth or map tiles get paused while someone determines whether we’d like to proceed at that rate. There is a not so fine line between scaling for a rush/event and a resume generating event.

Okay, fine, that's what I want. :)

It used to be we will take your server down. Now its we'll DDOS your serverless website and leave you a 100k bill.

I'm not sure how sustainable such business model is. When you owned the server, you could unplug it. Now you have no way of knowing if somebody is going to hit your /api a million times per minute

I also prefer to get a (decaf) coffee, listen to some music while someone DDoS'd my VPS. I prefer to pay few $ / month for my VPS instead of paying thousands and "survive" the DDoS.

I pay $10/year for my VPS and host a WordPress Woocommerce store on it... It doesn't get much traffic, but it didn't take long to pay for itself either

where?

true. At what point could you say they are accomplices to the attackers

Ah the Yelp biz model:

"would be a shame if somebody read a bad review about your biz, pay us to remove it"

to Netlify

"would be a shame if somebody DDOS'd your serverless website, subscribe to our DDOS protection plan"

Reminiscent of booter sites behind cloudflare.

AWS guarantees protection from all DDoS attacks done at level 3-4 (Google aws shield). If someone calls your api million times then there is throttling.

So instead of DDoSing someone, you could make some not-so-large amount of requests to their APIs and instead of taking down their servers, you'll just take them down by bankrupting them with a huge invoice?

Representational state terrorism

With default settings an attacker can run up-to 10000 req/sec on your api gw which would result in a sizable bill if left unnoticed. So with AWS you have to configure throttling and AWS protects you from low level ddos. How do you save yourself from a huge traffic bill in a VPS?

AWS also has WAF to protect from DDoS , it is expensive but may save a day if you urgently need a protection.

Can you use free tier under a fake name? To drop ridiculous bills. How do they validate the customer?

There is no free plan, there is just free limit - you must add a card.

And what if you add a debit card without money? Or add a disposable card and then the next day you deactivate it?

Nowadays everyone push you to add a card to open free* account. Such disposable cards is a solution to this issue.

Your debt will be sold to a collection company.

Can they find and owner of the inactive card? If I put a fake name to their system

Your debit card bank has your real name and you agreed to share it to get the card in the first place.

In many countries this is meaningless.

I just ignore any horseshit that goes to collections outright

What a great achievement of our society. Inventing a financial instrument to buy and sell debts.

It really is. It decreases the risk and necessary KYC checks so a lot more people can get serviced that would be shown the door in a world where you can't sell a debt.

Many don't accept prepaid cards.

Is that new (relative to some previous point in time)? They don't have my card details.

just use a virtual card and then change the spending limit to $0? or freeze it

That still passes your personal info.

at least you wont get charged without your knowledge... which in the end, is the first step in getting this non-sense fixed, for a person... of course the government should fix it for everyone. This shit should probably be considered fraud anyways... companies get free passes all the time. My name (s9df898r32h) is my company, I should be able to steal whatever I want /s

Why are such large companies so incompetent though...

You will have to pay it AND a fee for fraud, and possibly their legal fees for tracking you down. You also will have a difficult time arguing that you were in good faith with this kind of shenanigans.

Bouncing checks are not a life hack to get stuff for free, they're a crime.

I thought they were the ones committing fraud ... either way you have to be crazy to subscribe to those services

Not really, no. Fraud requires intent.

I wonder whether they are running out of money which then causes these things. Netlify used to be a very nice and unique service, but then came GitHub, GitLab and Cloudflare Pages who all provide roughly the same services for less money.

So what do I do if this happens to me on the free tier? Just never pay the bill and leave? Will they come after me?

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