[HN Gopher] Avoid Surprise Bills from AWS
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Avoid Surprise Bills from AWS
Author : macdonst
Score : 50 points
Date : 2021-11-08 21:00 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.begin.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.begin.com)
| lxe wrote:
| How much was that domain name?
| macdonst wrote:
| Lol, we get that question all the time. One day we got offered
| $17,000 USD for the domain and it wasn't even the best offer
| that day
| anw wrote:
| So if that wasn't the best offer for the day, what makes that
| offer stand out to be mentioned vs the highest offer you had
| received that day?
| [deleted]
| echelon wrote:
| How much does a domain name like "begin.com" cost, and how do you
| get a good domain / brand name for your startup (without calling
| it "PurpleKerfuffle" or something unregistered)?
|
| Is there a market for this? A strategy?
|
| I'm trying to get something good, but I keep getting back figures
| in the millions of dollars. Even ".io" domains are $100k. It's
| ridiculous. Am I doing something wrong?
| jjoonathan wrote:
| Either you are the squatter, you pay the squatter, or you dodge
| the squatter. It is what it is.
| stopagephobia wrote:
| Some of us People of Age remember when getting a good domain
| was easy before squatters :)
|
| And yes its hard now. In real life you can have the same
| business name in two different business areas as long as it
| doesn't cause confusion. I think we should get rid of domains
| all the way, I should be able to register any text and make it
| DNS resolve.
|
| Only answer for having squatters is to make any "domain"
| buyable so they can't get all the good ones.
| rustc wrote:
| > I think we should get rid of domains all the way, I should
| be able to register any text and make it DNS resolve.
|
| > Only answer for having squatters is to make any "domain"
| buyable so they can't get all the good ones.
|
| How's that any different from the current domain name system?
| There will still be only one owner of the text "google" or
| "begin".
| zatarc wrote:
| Step 1: Avoid AWS.
| Supermancho wrote:
| This was my first thought. Understand that it's a financial
| risk to work with AWS at both small and large scale.
|
| I have a personal AWS setup that has no costs, at this time.
| I've run a business account at 50k+/mo. I've never had an
| account suspended or lost my credentials and those stories
| scare me a bit.
| dkersten wrote:
| After trying to set up Fargate and it only sending my logs to
| cloudwatch 25% of the time (Id deploy and get no logs, try
| again two to three times literally just clicking the button in
| the web console again and then it would work), if course AWS
| charged me for every . Two days and a $150 bill later I got fed
| up and moved to DigitalOcean App platform, where I fixed the
| issue (was a bug in my health checks) within ten minutes and a
| monthly bill of $10. That day I decided I will never again use
| AWS unless I can pay someone who really knows what they're
| doing to do it for me (and I have a good reason to actually
| want to use AWS). My life has been much less stressful since.
| Havoc wrote:
| Somewhat surprised none of the major clouds off true sandboxed
| learning environments as a competitive advantage. i.e. We will
| not charge you more than $100 no matter what. Sure that doesn't
| work for enterprise stuff that has to be online, but there is a
| big market for people that can swallow $100 accidents but not
| 15k. And whoever offers that first will attract the cautious
| crowd. I've got friends that point blank refuse to use cloud due
| to the open ended billing.
|
| (Azure comes closes as best as I can tell...their MSDN style
| credits seem to be true hard capped)
|
| [Invariably this get's the "but what to do about the data...can't
| just delete it...yes you can. The $100 crowd is ok with that. 30
| day grace then delete it...much like anyone with an unpaid bill]
| slimsag wrote:
| Isn't this DigitalOcean's whole business model, basically?
| Havoc wrote:
| Yeah. There are lots of hard capped options...just not among
| the big clouds. Which is fair
|
| I just don't get why the big 3 haven't tried to undercut
| their competition with this.
|
| It's a very easy way to attract casual dabblers and
| enthusiasts to your platforms
| xadhominemx wrote:
| > We will not charge you more than $100 no matter what. Sure
| that doesn't work for enterprise stuff that has to be online,
| but _there is a big market for people that can swallow $100
| accidents_ but not 15k
|
| I'm sure this market is actually tiny
| sebhook wrote:
| Google Cloud does this with new trial accounts, there's a very
| explicit step between free and paid services.
| Havoc wrote:
| >Google Cloud does this with new trial accounts
|
| I've already got an account that has used free credits. So me
| creating another account to utilise the free allowance again
| would presumably be not OK
| eqmvii wrote:
| If only there were a way to stop the surprise billing once it
| starts.
|
| A friend created an AWS account with a new email address for a
| one-off side project, and wound up locked out of both the email
| account and the AWS account. But AWS has the credit card, so a 25
| cent mystery charge appears every month.
|
| AWS support is completely useless despite years of attempts at
| escalation, and of course the credit card company can't stop the
| automatic payments. The "solution" from both AWS and the credit
| card company is to... dispute the charge every month.
|
| Forever.
| pan69 wrote:
| I had a similar thing recently. As I understand it, AWS uses a
| digital token for your added a credit card. Contact your card
| provider to renew/rotate/delete the digital token that is
| attached to your card. That should stop charges.
|
| Doing that obviously might impact other services for which you
| use that card so you might need to re-add your card to those
| services.
| shampine wrote:
| Generally tokenization is done by some vault or processor. I
| don't know how Amazon operates internally, due to their scale
| means it's probably all in house. But Visa does have token
| representations and they do also have visa account updater
| (which keeps visa/merchants in sync for saved instruments ..
| e.g. Netflix). I've never seen the token implemented,
| generally just some vault (Braintree, Spreedly, etc). And if
| you are typing in a 15/16 digit number it's likely being
| vaulted/tokenized but not by the issuer but by the
| merchant/processor.
| laegooose wrote:
| That's a lot of worries about 3$ per year.
| [deleted]
| Quikinterp wrote:
| I think it's the premise rather than the cost that matters.
| I'd be scared that $3 turns into $300 or something
| Ekaros wrote:
| Or everyone starts doing it. That will quickly add up. Just
| think of revenue they could get from millions of users for
| providing no service at all...
| nijave wrote:
| Report the card as stolen so it's reissued with a new number :)
| e9 wrote:
| I did that and next month new unapproved charge again. What
| happened is they auto updates stolen card with Postmates and
| then told me to contact Postmates but I don't have account
| with them. I basically now have to cancel credit card every
| month. I'm just gonna have to figure out how to get new one.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| It's an absurd solution, but they can cancel the card and get a
| new one, and that will stop AWS from being able to bill them.
| ProAm wrote:
| This is a good way to go to collections (at least in the US)
| and have your credit rating harmed. Probably not for .25c but
| everyone who says just to cancel a card to stop annoying
| bills is not a good answer.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| I've done exactly what I suggested and I've never had a
| bill sent to collections. YMMV, of course.
| judge2020 wrote:
| Maybe, however Visa has "account updater" which is an API so
| that companies with saved payment methods can update them to
| a new number once the old expires or is replaced. They might
| need to close their bank account if the bank participates in
| this.
|
| https://developer.visa.com/capabilities/vau
| indymike wrote:
| This feature can be turned off.
| ickyforce wrote:
| My card expired and now I'm getting every month a notice that
| my AWS account is going to be suspended. It's been 2 years...
| stephenhuey wrote:
| Stripe provides virtual cards so I use a separate one for each
| online service and can delete a card at a moment's notice.
| [deleted]
| ggoo wrote:
| This is just an ad, why is it being upvoted so much?
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Because the title touches a pain point that's existed on AWS
| for over a decade, and that also exists on every cloud
| provider. These multibillion dollar operations refuse to
| implement an option to set hard budget limits even though their
| customers want it and would benefit from it.
| Dig1t wrote:
| Can someone just make "AWS insurance"? Honestly seems like a
| service that some people might pay for.. like pay $100/month to
| have some service monitor and guarantee that your services will
| be scaled back or turned off if you hit your quota.
| Thaxll wrote:
| Or just setup regular alerts / emails from AWS...
|
| https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/monitori...
| rustc wrote:
| You can still rack up a huge bill if you run a public web
| service and don't monitor the alerts 24x7.
| mullingitover wrote:
| If you're using Datadog with its AWS integration, you can pull in
| your billing metrics and set up anomaly detection monitoring. If
| you set it up as a multi-alert, Datadog can event alert you on
| the specific category that has a billing anomaly.
| sergiotapia wrote:
| Use one opaque black box of costs to get clarity on another
| opaque black box of costs. I don't recommend this.
|
| Datadog very quickly adds on costs for things you have no idea
| you need or want. You have an additional "host parametrix
| double-channel provider" and it's an extra $200/month per 2000
| items. 2000 items of what? I don't know but you are at 1900 now
| and there's still 10 days to go in the month. Also, to manage
| those 2000 items, you need 2 additional pipe funnels so the
| data is churned to the right settings.... and so on.
|
| The sales team signed you on $60/month and now you're at
| $2189.48 and counting. Where the fuck is all this money going?
| you say to yourself and the inertia takes over and you close
| the Datadog tab.
| dkersten wrote:
| I really reach to use DD but I've heard a ton of stories like
| this and they scared me away.
| mullingitover wrote:
| It's not like hand-rolling the equivalent services that DD
| provides is free.
|
| > now you're at $2189.48 and counting.
|
| This is a wonderful bargain compared to the expense of hiring
| a full-time engineer (or more) to provision and maintain all
| the infrastructure that DD replaces.
| nijave wrote:
| You can do that with native CloudWatch monitoring, too, but it
| doesnt work well with spikey charges like up front reservations
| and things billed at the beginning of the month
|
| Technically they are "anomalies" but there's no human
| interaction required so you get false positive alarms. It also
| doesn't work well beyond a certain $ amount since the error
| bars get pretty big
|
| Is DataDog better with that?
| mullingitover wrote:
| With DD you can set up monitor downtimes in advance of
| expected anomalies. Also, at the beginning of the month costs
| can drop suddenly, so what you can do is set up separate
| 'over' and 'under' threshold monitors, and then set up
| downtime on the 'under' threshold at the beginning of the
| month.
| andred14 wrote:
| Avoid getting your app taken down on the whim of a few jerks ->
| run your apps on the blockchain.
|
| https://www.runonflux.io/
| robocat wrote:
| There are so many unlimited liability services that are extremely
| difficult to avoid as a business.
|
| I presume the primary issues is that service suppliers don't want
| to implement the systems to actually measure realtime costs
| properly (due to implementation costs, and balance sheet
| liability avoidance?).
|
| For example we wished to buy an IP phone service, but to avoid
| the high cost of getting hacked I wanted a way to limit our
| liability. There were not many choices. We choose a solution that
| was a prepay dollars-per-month-per-line system where we still
| signed unlimited liability: but at least it was more likely the
| cost would be controlled by the provider to the prepay amount
| (unless limit was lifted by crackers changing account limits). We
| were also careful with website passwords, and we paid on a
| business credit card for a second layer of protection.
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| The blog post says surprise bills rarely happen but nearly every
| company I've worked at that used AWS had surprise bills and had
| reasonably large projects to reign those bills in once they
| noticed the bills.
|
| This is such a large problem for AWS users that there are
| multiple SaaS systems that help people manage their AWS bills.
| paulpauper wrote:
| I have heard nothing but negative things about aws billing, such
| as overcharging and surprise billing. glad I do not use aws.
| emreb wrote:
| Is there a way to keep the lambda concurrency and perhaps
| introduce an x% error?
| benjaminwootton wrote:
| We are using a bunch of cloud services at the moment such as AWS,
| GCP, Snowflake, Databricks.
|
| These are all fantastic and I'm glad that we have them, but at
| the end of the month it feels like gut punches when the bills
| roll in.
|
| Between the infrastructure as code, the auto scaling and the
| weird credit based systems, it feels totally out of control even
| at micro scale.
|
| If I ever held the budget for a large organisation again I
| wouldn't sleep at night with the amount of financial risk.
|
| Cloud cost control should definetly be a growing demand in the
| future.
| FpUser wrote:
| I dropped AWS like a hot potato once the alternative solution for
| hosting large media files became feasible. I was sick of their
| bills.
|
| And now with dedicated servers / storage / decent bandwidth so
| affordable it would take a tectonic event for me to go anywhere
| near cloudy stuff for any service. Well I did some Azure because
| client required it but that is their money - their problem.
| ed25519FUUU wrote:
| I got a very surprising bill from GCP. I used bigquery to query
| the google public patent database[1]. I thought I was using
| enough predicates for it to effectively be a point query (using
| patent ID, etc).
|
| Turns out each single query was a full table scan of the 4TB
| dataset and cost about $5 each! I luckily stopped after 4 queries
| once my curiosity was satisfied, but I could have easily spent
| hundreds of dollars. It wasn't until some time later I saw my
| bill and realized what happened.
|
| They did do a "one-time charge reversal" for me. I didn't really
| feel satisfied with that response. I wanted them to admit such
| datasets are a huge liability for users.
|
| 1. https://github.com/google/patents-public-data
| slownews45 wrote:
| They should have just billed you - they reversed the charges
| (for your own issue) and you aren't happy.
|
| I think folks are used to being pretty catered to.
|
| And yes, being able to play with 4TB databases in the cloud and
| huge GPU instances is a "liability" - you pay for what you use.
|
| Google actually gives you a lot of data about jobs folks are
| running - check out
|
| https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/docs/information-schema-jo...
|
| and total bytes processed if you want to do estimates of a per
| job cost etc.
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| AWS offers alarms that will stop or terminate your service based
| on thresholds to solve exactly this problem. Why aren't these
| sufficient?
|
| https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/monitori...
|
| It's literally the first thing I do when spinning up an instance
| in case I have a bug or go viral (never happened).
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(page generated 2021-11-08 23:02 UTC)