[BukhariH]

I've been in the exact same situation with AWS ( http://cl.ly/SHOu ).

It was a nerve recking couple of days but I contacted AWS support and they were extremely good. They helped me secure my machine and then cancelled the 1.4K payment they were going to take from my account.

In all the whole process took 2.5 weeks and I only had to pay $15 for the I/O requests.

The best thing I can recommend is to talk to your host and tell them honestly you can't pay that much and you weren't the cause of the charges either.

[UnoriginalGuy]

AWS also has billing alarms. If you're running an account which should cost $15/month then for the love of god set an alarms at e.g. $20/month.

I had a reserved instance for 12 months, forgot to renew it, and on the 13th month (when it was on-demand) the usage creeped over my cap and I started getting alarms allowing me to kill the instance, renew my reserved, and restart it. Saved me at least $10.

On a related topic, I wish VPS providers allowed you to pre-pay. With Microsoft's Azure I have an MSDN Ultimate account, which has $150 of pre-paid credit on Azure. When you go over the $150 they just shut your stuff down rather than charging you (in fact I don't have a CC on there at all). They don't even offer this kind of service to non-MSDN subscriptions which sucks, I'd love to just pre-pay $50/month to them and have everything shut off when I exceed it (so it becomes a "no risk" playground).

[pmalynin]

You can prepay on Digital Ocean.

[UnoriginalGuy]

That isn't what their FAQ claims:

> Can I pay in advance?

> We do not currently accept pre-payment, but you can add additional credit to your account at anytime by sending in a PayPal payment.

https://www.digitalocean.com/help/pricing-and-billing/

[kekub]

Actually you can not pay a vps in advance, but it is like the "prepaid" mobile phone system... You can add credit to your account and pay your bills with that credit, which I think you could call "prepaid".

[e40]

I've seen AWS credit charges that people intended to make but didn't want. We have some public AMIs that include charges for our product. Twice AWS support contact us to ask if we would credit someone back on the order of $500 out of our pocket because their customer didn't realize running an AMI would incur charges. Yeah, I was pretty surprised by this, too. It seems AWS gives people one freebie, though.

[guan]

Did you grant the credit? Why or why not?

[e40]

We did because AWS did and we didn't want to look bad.

[rmc]

In aws, you can set up billing alerts, so they will email you if you go over X per month. It's a good idea to set that up, so at least you'll be alerted as soon as possible if you get hacked.

[NDizzle]

This is how you handle it. Billing alarms at the highest priority. I expect mine to fire off around the 20th of each month. I expect the second alarm to never fire.

[banku_brougham]

Hacked account => billing alarms get turned off. So you won't find out.

[rmc]

Yes, it's not foolproof, but you might get hacked by someone who forgets. It's another lawer of protection.

[malditojavi]

Same here, not as big as 4k, but only $200 more. AWS took care in an awesome way.