8 ms·

Avoid Surprise Bills from AWS

64 points by macdonst 5y ago

andred14 5y ago
Avoid getting your app taken down on the whim of a few jerks -> run your apps on the blockchain. https://www.runonflux.io/ https://www.runonflux.io/
emreb 5y ago
Is there a way to keep the lambda concurrency and perhaps introduce an x% error?
ggoo 5y ago
This is just an ad, why is it being upvoted so much?
- heavyset_go 5y ago
  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.
mullingitover 5y ago
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.
- nijave 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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.
- sergiotapia 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    I really reach to use DD but I’ve heard a ton of stories like this and they scared me away.
  - mullingitover 5y ago
    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.
zatarc 5y ago
Step 1: Avoid AWS.
- Supermancho 5y ago
  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 5y ago
  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.
that_guy_iain 5y ago
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.
Dig1t 5y ago
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 5y ago
  Or just setup regular alerts / emails from AWS... https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/monitoring/monitor_estimated_charges_with_cloudwatch.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/monitori...
  - rustc 5y ago
    You can still rack up a huge bill if you run a public web service and don't monitor the alerts 24x7.
benjaminwootton 5y ago
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 5y ago
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.
SavantIdiot 5y ago
AWS offers alarms and actions that will stop or terminate your service based on budget thresholds to solve exactly this problem. Why aren't these sufficient? https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/monitoring/UsingAlarmActions.html 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).
- zamadatix 5y ago
  I don't have access to the dashboard because I cancelled my AWS account rather than try to spend more time finding things that still needed to be unconfigured/disabled to get them to stop billing me (the last straw was going to the spend analyzer and it telling me it'd take 24 hours to see what is still costing me money) but: Can I terminate based on cost? Like "I have spent $1,000 this month in AWS, something has gone wrong just kill everything" (or at least runaway service buckets) or is it just "oh I forgot to terminate this particular EC2 instance once I was done with it it'd be nice if I could just set those rules up in advance"?
  - SavantIdiot 5y ago
    Yes. Step 1. Go to billing and create a monthly budget. Mine is $100. Step 2. Create an alert: First alert is I get an email when it exceeds 80% ($80) total AWS costs. Step 3. Create an action: I only have a single EC2 instance running a webserver that is always on. If my threshold is exceeded (say, a million people start downloading my pictures and my IO-OUT spikes), my action stops my EC2 inst via an IAM role action. Boom. Server goes offline instantly, without having to log in (like if I'm sleeping, or drunk). Done. Sometimes I get an alert because my usual cost is $35/mo and if a few domain renewals pop up that month, it will spike to $80. Hence the alert at $80 and action at $100 threshold. And I can use any kind of metric: IO bandwidth from downloads, RDS bandwidth for too many queries, if I had elastic instances, limit the # based on cost. It is completely flexible. You can terminate too, but I only have one, I don't use elastic pools to dynamically allocate. I don't get all the fuss, it is quite a simple service. Maybe it doesn't scale well for huge operations and that is the problem cuz i'm not a power user or company?
lxe 5y ago
How much was that domain name?
- macdonst 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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?
echelon 5y ago
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 5y ago
  Either you are the squatter, you pay the squatter, or you dodge the squatter. It is what it is.
  - redis_mlc 5y ago
    Now that's cynical. Love it!
  - winternett 5y ago
    Exactly all the same principles as the real estate market now basically.
- stopagephobia 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    > 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".
Havoc 5y ago
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 $100 crowd is ok with that. 30 day grace then delete it...much like anyone with an unpaid bill]
- slimsag 5y ago
  Isn't this DigitalOcean's whole business model, basically?
  - Havoc 5y ago
    Yeah. There are lots of hard capped options...just not among the big clouds. Which is fair I just don't get why the big 3 haven't tried to undercut their competition with this. It's a very easy way to attract casual dabblers and enthusiasts to your platforms
    - slimsag 5y ago
      Arguably, casual dabblers is what gets you increased support costs and does not land the big contracts. I wouldn't be surprised if AWS and GCP _intentionally_ do not do this because they'd rather focus on large enterprises "who are willing to foot the bill"
- sebhook 5y ago
  Google Cloud does this with new trial accounts, there's a very explicit step between free and paid services.
  - Havoc 5y ago
eqmvii 5y ago
If only there were a way to stop the surprise billing once it starts. A friend created an AWS account with a new email address for a one-off side project, and wound up locked out of both the email account and the AWS account. But AWS has the credit card, so a 25 cent mystery charge appears every month. AWS support is completely useless despite years of attempts at escalation, and of course the credit card company can't stop the automatic payments. The "solution" from both AWS and the credit card company is to... dispute the charge every month. Forever.
- laegooose 5y ago
  That's a lot of worries about 3$ per year.
  - Quikinterp 5y ago
    I think it's the premise rather than the cost that matters. I'd be scared that $3 turns into $300 or something
    - Ekaros 5y ago
      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...
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- stephenhuey 5y ago
  Stripe provides virtual cards so I use a separate one for each online service and can delete a card at a moment’s notice.
- nijave 5y ago
  Report the card as stolen so it's reissued with a new number :)
  - 5y ago
ed25519FUUU 5y ago
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 https://github.com/google/patents-public-data
- slownews45 5y ago
  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-jobs 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.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
robocat 5y ago
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.
paulpauper 5y ago
I have heard nothing but negative things about aws billing, such as overcharging and surprise billing. glad I do not use aws.
brutal_chaos_ 5y ago
Move away from vendor lock-in.

64 points by macdonst 5y ago

Avoid getting your app taken down on the whim of a few jerks -> run your apps on the blockchain. https://www.runonflux.io/ https://www.runonflux.io/

emreb 5y ago

Is there a way to keep the lambda concurrency and perhaps introduce an x% error?

ggoo 5y ago

This is just an ad, why is it being upvoted so much?

heavyset_go 5y ago
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.

mullingitover 5y ago

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.

nijave 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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.
sergiotapia 5y ago
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 5y ago
  I really reach to use DD but I’ve heard a ton of stories like this and they scared me away.
- mullingitover 5y ago
  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.

zatarc 5y ago

Step 1: Avoid AWS.

Supermancho 5y ago
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 5y ago
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.

that_guy_iain 5y ago

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.

Dig1t 5y ago

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 5y ago
Or just setup regular alerts / emails from AWS... https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/monitoring/monitor_estimated_charges_with_cloudwatch.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/monitori...
- rustc 5y ago
  You can still rack up a huge bill if you run a public web service and don't monitor the alerts 24x7.

benjaminwootton 5y ago

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 5y ago

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.

SavantIdiot 5y ago

AWS offers alarms and actions that will stop or terminate your service based on budget thresholds to solve exactly this problem. Why aren't these sufficient? https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/monitoring/UsingAlarmActions.html 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).

zamadatix 5y ago
I don't have access to the dashboard because I cancelled my AWS account rather than try to spend more time finding things that still needed to be unconfigured/disabled to get them to stop billing me (the last straw was going to the spend analyzer and it telling me it'd take 24 hours to see what is still costing me money) but: Can I terminate based on cost? Like "I have spent $1,000 this month in AWS, something has gone wrong just kill everything" (or at least runaway service buckets) or is it just "oh I forgot to terminate this particular EC2 instance once I was done with it it'd be nice if I could just set those rules up in advance"?
- SavantIdiot 5y ago
  Yes. Step 1. Go to billing and create a monthly budget. Mine is $100. Step 2. Create an alert: First alert is I get an email when it exceeds 80% ($80) total AWS costs. Step 3. Create an action: I only have a single EC2 instance running a webserver that is always on. If my threshold is exceeded (say, a million people start downloading my pictures and my IO-OUT spikes), my action stops my EC2 inst via an IAM role action. Boom. Server goes offline instantly, without having to log in (like if I'm sleeping, or drunk). Done. Sometimes I get an alert because my usual cost is $35/mo and if a few domain renewals pop up that month, it will spike to $80. Hence the alert at $80 and action at $100 threshold. And I can use any kind of metric: IO bandwidth from downloads, RDS bandwidth for too many queries, if I had elastic instances, limit the # based on cost. It is completely flexible. You can terminate too, but I only have one, I don't use elastic pools to dynamically allocate. I don't get all the fuss, it is quite a simple service. Maybe it doesn't scale well for huge operations and that is the problem cuz i'm not a power user or company?

lxe 5y ago

How much was that domain name?

macdonst 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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?

echelon 5y ago

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 5y ago
Either you are the squatter, you pay the squatter, or you dodge the squatter. It is what it is.
- redis_mlc 5y ago
  Now that's cynical. Love it!
- winternett 5y ago
  Exactly all the same principles as the real estate market now basically.
stopagephobia 5y ago
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 5y ago
  > 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".

Havoc 5y ago

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 5y ago
Isn't this DigitalOcean's whole business model, basically?
- Havoc 5y ago
  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
  - slimsag 5y ago
    Arguably, casual dabblers is what gets you increased support costs and does not land the big contracts. I wouldn't be surprised if AWS and GCP _intentionally_ do not do this because they'd rather focus on large enterprises "who are willing to foot the bill"
sebhook 5y ago
Google Cloud does this with new trial accounts, there's a very explicit step between free and paid services.
- Havoc 5y ago

eqmvii 5y ago

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.

laegooose 5y ago
That's a lot of worries about 3$ per year.
- Quikinterp 5y ago
  I think it's the premise rather than the cost that matters. I'd be scared that $3 turns into $300 or something
  - Ekaros 5y ago
    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...
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
stephenhuey 5y ago
Stripe provides virtual cards so I use a separate one for each online service and can delete a card at a moment’s notice.
nijave 5y ago
Report the card as stolen so it's reissued with a new number :)
- 5y ago

ed25519FUUU 5y ago

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 https://github.com/google/patents-public-data

slownews45 5y ago
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-jobs 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.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

robocat 5y ago

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.

paulpauper 5y ago

I have heard nothing but negative things about aws billing, such as overcharging and surprise billing. glad I do not use aws.

brutal_chaos_ 5y ago

Move away from vendor lock-in.