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Huge bills?
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Huge bills?

restingresting Member

Signed up to talk about encryption at rest but I guess I have to start with this old issue that somehow I've never got to the bottom of.

AWS is well-known for its policy of not providing hard usage caps. Many (all?) other cloud providers are the same.

Can one run a VPS without getting exposed to the risk of running up very large bills through misadventure?

How do you approach this issue? Does it not arise with VPS in the same way as the big cloud providers? If so, what are the reasons for that?

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PS: Monitoring sounds like it may not adequately solve the practical problem for side project dabblers like me:

  • It's not my full-time job

  • Nor do I intend to run a profit-making service

  • With big cloud providers (not sure about VPS), famously, big bills can get racked up before people manage to respond

  • "We'll probably not crucify you and let you off the $100,000. Happy non-crucifiction days are ahead, probably!" is not very reassuring

  • If the problem is that overages are caused by configuration mistakes (and sometimes people abusing those mistakes), I'm a little sceptical whether self-administered capping mechanisms are reliable enough in practice to address the problem? (in contrast, it is conceivable that even quite fallible company adminstered capping mechanisms backed by a hard cap promise could successfully address the problem by spreading risk across customers). Admittedly the monitoring-as-user-implemented-usage-cap problem is much more severe with clouds with a huge feature set like AWS.

Finally: regardless of whether usage caps are a practical option right now: If you would like to defend the position that usage caps are impossible in some sense: I personally think that's a sterile debate, so I'd appreciate your starting a different thread to discuss that if you'd like to.

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