Before everyone gets their pitchforks out - Person from the image posted on Hacker News, CEO replied and said this charge shouldn’t have happened and they wouldn’t be charging the client anything.
Phew, good to know that if this ever happens to me as a customer, I just need to go viral on HN. What a relief.
Yeah that’s is an attack on Netlify and not on him. It’s them that should have protections against this. I argue that the customer can’t even effectively defend against this themselves if they’re using Netlify, which is turn means a court would likely get them off the hook for anything that can easily be classified as a DDOS attack.
Hm yes and no. The user might have angered someone with their website and it might well have been targeted to them instead of Netlify as a whole? I can imagine them using that point in a court if that was the case.
If I were to host on such a service I’d probably put cloudflare in front. Especially as it seems to be static content. But I wouldn’t host on a service with unlimited pricing anyway. I’d much rather see my hobby site go down than to have world-class uptime and pay 100k :P
But how do you go from 10GB monthly to 190TB without it raising any flags? Apparently their site had been up for 4 years and suddenly the usage spikes by nearly 2 million percent, and nobody thinks to check up on why, or to notify the user that they’re using an extreme amount of data, way beyond what they usually do.
You’d think a competent company would have bots to scour this data and raise alarms, yet here we are.
Hell even AWS isn’t this bad. You can go in and set the maximum data you’re prepared to allow and then it’ll simply just block any connection attempt after that point and send you an alert.
You just have to be aware that you might need to keep an eye on things and be ready to increase bandwidth occasionally in case of something like Black Friday, assuming that kind of thing is relevant to your site.
The user might have angered someone with their website and it might well have been targeted to them instead of Netlify as a whole? I can imagine them using that point in a court if that was the case.
They wouldn’t really get anywhere with that claim though, even if it were true and they could find evidence, because the company claims that they actively scan for and protect against this sort of thing, and even they admit that it was a DDoS attack.
deleted by creator
Good to hear but it sounds like if the person hadn’t gathered so much traction on HN they might still have been screwed.
CEO said that forgiving bills for this kind of a thing is a standard practice, but how come this was the customer support’s first reaction:
We normally discount these kinds of attacks to about 20% of the cost, which would make your new bill $20,900. I’ve currently reduced it to about 5%, which is $5,225.
If the customer support has authority to give 20%/5% discounts, this seems to me like the standard practice, and the CEO is probably just doing damage control because this became public.
In this case, customer service is giving roughly 80% / 95% discounts. Which I think bolsters your point even further.
When I worked in customer service I think the largest i was ever able to issue was a 10% discount. Even with managerial approval I don’t think I ever saw anyone get more than a 25% discount, and that was for legitimate complaints, not the Karen style made up whining.
Good to know, thanks for the info.
Awesome, thank you for the update.
Why pay for a small VPS to host your static site when you can host it for free with a small chance of bankruptcy?
Why pay for hosting a static site at all when github, cloudflare etc offer free hosting
Seems like the person in the OP was using the free tier of that service, which had always been fine.
But can you set a limit to stop it going above the free tier
Active DDoS mitigation
Netlify monitors for traffic pattern anomalies and spikes, and effectively controls for them as needed.
https://www.netlify.com/security/
So is this just a lie? I have never used them and after this post I’m not going to be trying that anytime soon, if ever
Sounds like they violated contract to me.
Unfortunately, I think the way to make this right under our legal system is pay them, then sue them in small claims court to get the $5k back.
Which doesn’t work if OP doesn’t have $5k in cash ready to go.
Sounds like this was “resolved” on HN and CEO said this was an error, but I’m not so sure. The CEO’s response seems to imply that that communication to/from service reps is true and not made up. The original post shows they have a business practice for cases like this. Plus if the company was willing to settle from their business practice of 20% down to 5% (which in this case was 15k) then that very likely isn’t a decision a service rep could make, so you had some mid to upper level manager make that approval to write-off the $15k and decide that $5k was still owed to the company.
As far as I can tell the only error here is that someone posted about it.
Not to mention the CEO’s response from HN just says this shouldn’t have happened on free accounts, but that begs the question of would this have been any different on non-free accounts where Netlify failed to mitigate a DDoS as advertised?
Netlify has the highest network data transfer fees. If you’re going to use them, you must have a CDN.
Yeah this is why I pay only for services with fixed fees (or that allow me to set a hard limit). Wow, 100k would bankrupt me completely.
You and 90% of the rest of society.
deleted by creator
Which static site hosters do this?
Does netlify not let you set a spend limit?
Also, who knows if Netlify didn’t provoque the ddos to make free loaners pay?
Infinite money trick
Fear of this is why I’ve never relied on free tiers unless there’s some kind of spend circuit breaker available.
Yeah it seems like such an obvious feature. May be there was one and the OOP didn’t enable that.
I’m sure there not being one is the feature. Trapping people into the free tier and getting them on overages.
Of course for a hobby site that will never manage to pay this is not a good business model but I can see how this works for more moderate corporate use.
I just checked I have no payment method on file. Should protect me.
Without knowing any specifics of the TOS or the exact setup beyond what I could gather in this thread: generally speaking they could still send you a bill through email or otherwise.
After that, if you’re not paying up, they might be able to successfully get the money out of you through court regardless, depending on a few factors. What’s more likely for smaller sums is that they’ll just drop it and ban you though.
IANAL of course.
Did you sign a contract? Then no, probably not.
Just because you are trying the free samples at a store, doesn’t mean you can also take other food off the shelf without paying just because you left your wallet at home. Bandwidth still costs money.
I mean, I am fine with my hobby website being taken down if it starts to consume an unreasonable amount of bandwidth.
They don’t need to give a free tier and I am not entitled to getting anything out of them. Since they have decided to offer one, I do expect to be consulted before sending a bill worth a ferrari.
Now’s a great time to learn about rate limiting and honeypots. Even so, I hope you can talk them down further seeing as you don’t sound like a large company.
What is your URL ? You need extra traffic 💸
