I’ve been a netlify user since 2017 and I just deleted all my sites. I can’t risk receiving a $100k bill for toy projects. Your “current policy” is not good enough.
Same, as it stands you the user are legally liable for the full bill unless netlify graciously forgive it.
Even in op's case, they didn't (still charging 5k!).
If there was an option to cap billing, or at least some legally binding limit on liability, then I can countenance using netlify.
Until then, it's just not feasible nor worth the risk.
the fact that once it arrives to the limits does not display an error page.
At this point I honestly do not care about they changing their policy, they should have thought that a normal person receiving a 100000$ bill on a free tier shall not been at all on the table in any circumstance, even if they forgive the bill, nobody needs to stress out like that.
Same. I will (almost certainly) never incur a $104k bill, but switching to Cloudfare Pages looks free and I don't want to depend on unwritten policies of goodwill to mitigate the potential risk.
Same here. Will I ever get a level of traffic that would cause this problem? Extremely doubtful. Is it worth the risk when Cloudflare Pages is a similarly easy offering, and took 5 minutes to switch to? Hell no.
> What’s a good, simple alternative for a VueJS app?
I'm not sure about VueJS specifically, but I run everything I can off a $6/m digital ocean droplet (static sites, web apps, git repos, RDBMS, some other custom apps I've written) and it hasn't broken a sweat yet[1].
My understanding used to be that requests will be dropped if my virtual server can't handle it, and I'll have to transfer 10,000TB to get to a $100,000 bill.
In practice, my server will not physically handle the load to serve more than maybe $1000 of data a month; it will fall over before that.
In summary, using a VPS is sorta like an instant hard cap.
[1] Until I tried using Jenkins. Which crashed constantly because apparently 512GB of RAM is too little for what it does. I'm now in the process of writing my own little CD tool that isn't going to go over 30MB of RAM just to run my deployment scripts.
Having a personal VPS is the way. I run a SvelteJS app as well as my personal website, blog and a couple other services on a $6 droplet and it runs great.
I agree with both of your philosophies and also run a VPS. However, lots of people would have no idea how to manage a server from scratch or to install a web server, even a static one. Netlify really is pretty amazingly simple for what it offers, which is a lot. And even among those who think they can run a server, many probably have wide open security holes they are oblivious to.
> And even among those who think they can run a server, many probably have wide open security holes they are oblivious to.
This is the big thing, but I also think that modern out-the-box OSes are pretty damn secure these days.
IOW, the amount of knowledge and time needed to maintain my single VPS is a lot less than the knowledge and time you will need to manage your costs using multiple hosted SaaS suppliers for static hosting, web-app hosting, database hosting, repo hosting, etc.
Cloudflare pages is pretty much drop in for netlify. And it has unlimited bandwidth for free (at least in theory. Guess they might call you if your site does 1 petabyte per hour)
The only "fix" here is to act like Hetzner and null route upon DDoS, price cap the thing, or offer unlimited bandwidth on the free tier like e.g. Cloudflare Pages.
Uncapped but paid is a recipe for disaster and you'll always be subject to the will of the support staff when something happens. If they can grasp to a straw leading to suspicions that it's not in fact a DDoS attack, you can for example be sure they'll do just that. Just no.
With a 48 core Epyc or 80 core arm server, one really shouldnt need much more for a middling project. There are enterprises who run entire services on such hardware.
How does price caps work on Hetzner? I never managed to figure that out from reading their price lists. It looks to me like they charge for each TB, and the only thing I can see is that you can set an email alert to go off when close to some threshold?
Traffic limits change depending on our products:
See https://docs.hetzner.com/robot/general/traffic/
1) dedicated servers: unlimited
2) cloud servers: changes based on package
3) colocation: changes based on product
4) managed servers: unlimited
5) managed vServers: 20 TB
6) Storage Boxes: unlimited
We only calculate outgoing traffic. We do not count incoming and internal traffic. --Katie
Thanks, I have 3 sites I need to get off Netlify and I’ve spent the morning reading about Cloudflare Pages.
My only hesitation is the 20k file limit; one of our sites is a large Gatsby site that generates certain content programmatically, sometimes using a series of YAML files as the source. Pretty sure we’re over 20k pages by themselves. Been meaning to move this one to Next.js sometime but that’s not on our roadmap anytime soon.
I've run all of my hobby projects, including personal web pages, a Wordpress site that serves a local club, a small single-JS web app, and E-mail hosting for my family and a few other domains, on a single $5/mo VPS, and have never received a bill higher than $5 for the past, I don't know... 15 years.
If your web site makes you money in proportion to the amount of views or bandwidth you use, by all means, go with a provider that increases your costs when your traffic rises. But if your web site does not make you money, why not host it somewhere for a flat rate?
I don't get that either. I earn all my money from my websites and serve > 1mio requests daily all from a single Vultr instance for less than $150 including backups and more traffic than I ever need. With monitoring, CDN, DNS, ddos protection, and whatever I pay about $200 a month, no surprised and a lot of room to grow or get HN hugged, or whatever.
I've been on a $25 instance for years for all my sites, which worked as well.
Did exactly the same, moving everything over to Cloudflare took me less than 15 minutes. “We’ll forgive those cases, pinky swear” is not a valid excuse when putting (even opt-in) hard limits in place is technically viable.
If there was an option to cap billing, or at least some legally binding limit on liability, then I can countenance using netlify.
Until then, it's just not feasible nor worth the risk.