A Shocked Programmer Got A $104k Bill

Can you imagine how many shrimps you could eat for 104 thousand dollars?

Catania is a cosy city located in east Sicily, Italy. I love the architecture and seaside climate of this place. The air is fresh, it’s sunny and warm.

That’s why last summer we’ve visited this place. I don’t know about you but I really like to eat. That’s why on the first day there we’ve searched for an all you can eat restaurant.

Compared to regular restaurants, all you can eat is more expensive, but it’s great because you can try a lot of different local dishes to decide what’s your favorite.

Of course the whole trick to have the experience is to prevail with an empty stomach for as long as possible. After a rather light breakfast and Ursino Castle visit, we’ve decided to try out Happy Wok, a popular local restaurant.

The amount of seafood was mesmerizing. My favorite way of trying such places is to take a little bit of everything, try it out, and settle for one-two things I liked the most.

As much as I’m devoted to eat, I can’t unfortunately eat too much. So after the trial, I was alnost full. Settled for oysters and shrimps I’ve headed to refill my dish.

I’ve never ate oysters so it was quite an adventure. After two oysters and three shrimps I was full and happy.

We’ve started to discuss how such places can operate if two hungry polish tourists can eat almost all oysters fisherman collected on thst day. Not to say a bus full of polish tourists.

It seems like such restaurant owners have some secret formula that accounts to average cost of meal for an average person.

They also have to account to central europe tourists, we’ve debated.

Overall, they’re profitable despite some people eat more, because other people eat less, and also because the very formula of all you can eat attracts more visitors.

What it means is that there’s an average and usually expected maximum usage of food per day restaurant needs to prepare.

I guess if there were two or three buses from Poland on one day, the restaurant would run out of anything that resembles pierogi and kielbasa.

But that’s not really a problem considering the restaurant could close earlier when resources got depleted.

Unfortunately such physical boundaries doesn’t hold in the digital world.

For example today online a user of Netlify service reported that he got a bill for 104 thousand dollars for a static website.

Can you imagine getting such bill not from a hospital?

Surprisingly it’s exactly what that user got due to 190 terrabytes of transfer his page generated in four days!

One simple page can use as little as 1MB, so it would mean roughly 190 million visits in 4 days (approximately).

Such things happen. For example the famous Reddit’s hug of death effect causes a lot of traffic in short time.

So it’s not always a bad thing. But this user got suspicious, and after an investigation it turned out that the transfer wasn’t caused by visitors by people downloading massively an MP3 file he located on the server.

As of the writing time it’s unclear what was the MP3. It sounds like it was the user’s music that was downloaded massively by people for unknown reasons. Hopefully because it was that good.

So it may be a career opportunity, or a serious headache. For the record Netlify offered to lower the bill to 5 thousand dollars and later when the topic became popular canceled it altogether. Great!

It leaves me however with questions no one answered so far. Cloud services offer unlimited access to resources and you pay for it later.

It’s so much different than the Happy Wok. There’s no limit. It’s like you’d agree to pay for every customer visiting the restaurant.

You go to sleep, and during that time people learn about it. Travel from around the world to that restaurant. Pack their pockets with shrimps, collect them in buckets. The restaurant owner is resourceful so he collects all shrimps from Italy and sells it all.

The next day you wake up to a bill hoping it is only a bad dream.

But that’s how actually cloud providers operate. They give your users unlimited resources you have to pay for.

I don’t know if today, but some time ago I’ve checked and there was no way to limit bills in popular cloud provider services.

So as much as I like the story with a happy end, it doesn’t solve the general problem. The problem being is that shrimps have to be limited somehow.

I don’t know about you, but for me even a 5 thousand dollar bill would be devastating for several years.

It’s not the first story of this kind I’ve read and it always makes me wonder how many people got a bill for one, five thousand dollars from a service provider and the provider refused to lower it.

For sure terms of service and binding agreement make such bills unavoidable.

The other side of that coin is that when service provider is paid for resources, he doesn’t have a financial motivation to limit the resources. Poor optimization? Not his problem. DDOS? Not his problem.

From one side cloud services are great because they can handle massive operations. On the other hand the unlimited character of cloud services poses a real financial risk.

Happy Wok is so much nicer!

And what do you think about it? Do you like all you can eat?

Follow me, and clap if you want me to write another article!