[patio11]

Incidentally, since many HNers probably come at this from a mental model of "Anything which appears on an invoice is non-negotiable and simply must be paid": a B2B service provider which collects payment after services are rendered is knowingly taking on credit risk and has already priced non-collectability of some accounts into their services. You may be overestimating how much drama is required for someone at their company to say "Wow, really? OK, sorry about that. I'll write it off."

This is one of many, many, many reasons why we don't generally do cost-based pricing and, when we do do cost-based pricing, the markup is absolutely phenomenal. It has to include risk premiums. As long as it do include risk premiums, you don't have to sweat the small stuff like e.g. an uncollectable $4k invoice. (n.b. Small stuff! $4k hiccups are utterly routine events and largely dealt with by processes rather than by treating them as sudden emergencies, even if they feel like that to natural humans.)

[readme]

Also OP, if they don't write it off make sure to tell us all who it was so we can avoid them.

The same thing happened to me with amazon. Amazon pid for it. It's highly unreasonable in my opinion to ask the customer of a VPS to pay for damages caused by a malicious attacker. It's tantamount to a landlord expecting you to pay after an arsonist comes along and burns down your apartment, just because you happened to be renting it at the time.

[johnchristopher]

May I propose another analogy:

- a landlord* expecting you to pay after a squatter came along and opened a faucet in the basement (where OP rarely goes) to fill its own super tanker

* or the water company ?

[13]

I have had this experience. In my case the bill was altered to $0 before I'd even got to the point in the conversation where I intended to ask for some relief. It most certainly doesn't cost them that much, and it's within their interests to keep customers coming back for repeat payments than soured by being forced to pay an exorbitant fee for something which was obviously not their fault.

[justizin]

Yeah, the $4k is kind of a manufactured figure, bandwidth expenses are particularly inflated, but it makes sense at smaller scale - if you have a $15/mo plan with 2TB of transfer and you go over 1TB, a few bucks penalty doesn't sound outrageous, and their cost is impacted by higher network management costs.

But, if you have a huge spike that wasn't really your fault, it doesn't cost them any more to write that off than it does the bandwidth that is consumed by a DDoS attack that is mitigated by a firewall.

When I worked at Rackspace, we hosted a very popular flash cartoon for one month after yahoo kicked them off the $5 hosting plan for pushing god knows how much bandwidth. They basically saturated a gigabit network port from a single server, and we sent them a bill for like a gajillion dollars. They went to another hosting company, of course, and I think got the bill down to something they managed to pay off.

Someone obviously had porsche-eyes, I thought it was kind of a shitty thing to do to the guys, who came to the office to make the voices of their characters for us and stuff.

[switch007]

I worked for a hosting company and we'd normally charge time spent handling the issue plus the upstream cost of bandwidth, depending on how nice the customer acted.