[frozenport]

Back in the old days before VPS, websites would autoscale leading to huge and unprecedented bills. For example, I hosted a website that contained download links. One day the Chinese found out and hot-linking causing my server bill to jump from $5.95 to over $200. I was 12 and this made me sad.

[alexeston]

I believe I was not around then. I started when the shared hosting was a really popular thing with fixed bandwidth and even that could of easily survived HN. So, I'm kind of amazed on why some sites can't handle that in 2013.

[frozenport]

When you exceed your limit they charge you a penalty.

[alexeston]

Yes, but at least here in Estonia the limit was more than enough (usually 500gb of bandwidth per month).