Member-only story
💻 Set Up A Cloud Hard Budget Limit To Avoid $100k Bills
Using cloud services is convinient, but it exposes you to unlimited liability and expensive bills to pay. From this article you’ll learn how to protect your small or hobby project from such risks!
Using cloud services and cloud computation is tempting. You get unlimited access to resources and big tech relies on such services. So it’s natural to put a portfolio on S3 and call it a day.
How Cloud Service May Drain Your Wallet And Unlimited Amount Of Money You Don’t Own
However, it comes with a serious risk. While you get an unlimited access to resources, cloud provider gets an unlimited access to your credit card, even exceeding all the money you have or might have earned during your lifetime.
In February I covered a case where a developer got $104k bill. Fortunately they cancelled it.
Lately another developer reported he had to pay for 404 visits (not found). It means that he had to pay for the visits to pages that didn’t even exist on his website.
It means that even if your website is empty you can get into trouble. The number of ways it can happen is very very long.
For example someone might make a direct or indirect DDoS attack. In such case generating a large amount of traffic can use a lot of resources you’ll have to pay for.
The biggest adventage of cloud, the ability to scale almost indefinitely is also it’s biggest weakness. The cloud provider won’t stop serving stuff even of it’s bad for your wallet.
Of course cloud providers sometimes try to prevent such situations or cancel bills, but it’s never 100% sure and isn’t really reliable as long as there isn’t a company willing to offer cloud bill insurance….
Other cases when you may have to pay a high bill is:
- putting out a MP3 file discovered and hotlinked by someone so…
