[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.