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Comment by tutfbhuf | Hacker News Reader

I don't think the Netlify case has happend due to serverless architecture. Yes, there are many technical issues with serverless architectures, but getting a huge bill for incoming traffic is independent from a serverless architecture. You could also put your own hardware in a colo and pay for traffic. If your data center provider does not protect you from DDoS and simply bills by the TB, then the same situation would occur. Of course, one could argue that the prices per TB are much cheaper in a colo situation compared to Netlify and therefore a 100k bill is very unlikely to occur, but then I would make this the main point: absurdly high traffic costs and no DDoS mitigation, and wouldn't put it behind a "serverless horrors" title.

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If your stuff scales to infinity your money burn rate also scales to infinity. A single server in a colo can only do so much damage to your wallet before it’s saturated.

Sure, but according to the article, he received the 100k bill because of peak traffic of 60TB of bandwidth per day over several days. If you have a dedicated server in a colo, then a 10GbE connection is very common these days. With a 10GbE connection, you can serve 100TB of traffic in a single day. Hence, if the colo had the same prices as Netlify for traffic, then a single server with a 10GbE connection would be sufficient for such a high bill, no serverless and infinity scaling required, just absurdly high traffic costs.

No Colo charges the same insane prices for Traffic as Cloud Providers. Hetzner charges 1€/TB over 20TB for their 10GbE Servers

Yup, this is exactly my point. It's not the serverless architecture, something you set up on Hetzner yourself with OpenFaaS (https://github.com/openfaas/faas), that is to blame here but the insane pricing scheme for traffic.

... which you generally get with serverless offers.

Correlation does not imply causation. There is no inherent reason why a serverless architecture would force a provider to have insane high traffic costs, hence it doesn't make sense to put blame on the term "serverless" for that.

On the other hand, if one could explain such causation, then I would be very interested in hearing about it.

Strong correlation is enough to advise against using serverless to people who might not be experts and might easily fall into such traps.

> Correlation does not imply causation.

Correct, but the effect on the wallet doesn't care if there is a causal relationship. And since my wallet is closer to me than a philosophical debate, the conclusion I reach in this case, is to move my site ;-)

The whole point of serverless is to trick people into insane pricing.

Nah.You get a dedicated box at hetzner and get unmetered 1gbit and use as much as you want as long as you dont do mining or piracy etc.

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