[ghaff]

Yes. A hard cost limit isn't a hard cost limit unless they start deleting resources like databases which has its own problems. One can imagine a semi-hard cost limit that only cuts off stateless services like EC2 and data egress but AWS apparently just doesn't care enough about courting customers like the GP to implement.

I agree that there is some financial risk to using AWS although my understanding is that they're pretty forgiving of surprise bills--at least the first time.

[meibo]

A googler recently commented here that, in order to forgive "bigger" bills, you really need to know someone to pull some heavy strings for you - and that it doesn't happen in many cases.

This taught me to be very very careful with this stuff, and to not bet on Google or Amazon being nice to me when I am bound to mess something up at some point - because with the complexity these services carry, it's no wonder people fall into cost traps all the time.

[ghaff]

I do use AWS S3 for storage and it's very cheap for my needs. But I do periodically think about switching to a VPS (or to Backblaze which does let you set a hard cap).

I also help out a small non-profit newspaper mostly operated by students. We're going to need some storage for an archiving project and there's no way in hell I'm going to use AWS for that.

[rsync]

There are also cloud storage providers that do not charge for transfer or egress, etc.

There’s one in particular I’m thinking of…

[imvictor]

It's Wasabi S3 https://wasabi.com, and ridiculously cheap for storage.