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Comment by mtberatwork | Hacker News Reader

AWS Shield Advanced though...so what does this mean if you are on Standard? One of the biggest fears is launching an EC2 instance (or some other service) only to get hit at some random point in time with a DDoS attack and a large bill at the end of the month. I've read stories of AWS forgiving events like this, but are you now up a creek if you don't subscribe to their "Advanced" tier?

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Precisely. The majority of people who are be afraid of using AWS services for the risk of a bill shock due to a DDoS would be small customers who won't be able to afford the 3,000$ per month price tag for the advanced shield anyways. For them, it's still risky to use AWS.

Unless you're spending $xx,xxx or above monthly with AWS, you're probably better off using Cloudflare for DDOS protection.

EDIT: Number is professional opinion from my experience running large AWS accounts over the last 10 years.

I hear this all the time, people being surprised by an $80k bill when they're used to $5k. Step one of using any of these services, whether it's AWS, GCP, Azure, etc. ENABLE BILLING ALERTS. You can be notified as soon as you're being charged x%, or $x over last months bill, or set your own amounts and hop on and investigate what's going on. Please set this up. If you don't have this on right now, stop what you're doing and turn it on.

This is the first thing that I do any time I'm involved with a new infrastructure.

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