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Comment by busterarm | Hacker News Reader

I accidentally left a 24xlarge instance running for a month without realizing it and they looked at the activity and were totally cool about zeroing the bill for that instance for the month. Basically gave me us a $2000 credit.

It does probably help that I said I would be careful not to do that again and had already put in a CloudWatch Alarm to automatically power-off the instance after a set period of idleness before filing the ticket.

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There have been so many stories of AWS accounts being “hacked” (actually they weren’t. someone posted their keys to a public github repo), the person panicking, then sending a ticket to AWS and then getting a refund. AWS support is excellent - especially on the business tier and above.

I will gladly pay the extra money for AWS than to even think about DO or even GCP for a money making project.

But more on topic: with Aurora/MySQL you can have an on-site hosted read replica from an AWS hosted database. That would be a cheap, easy real time backup solution if I were really worried about AWS screwing me over.

The actual cost to Amazon is so low it probably isn't worth insisting on charging the mistakes that contact support.

The good will generated by the stream of customer testimonials of this process we hear about is priceless.

The proposition seems to go something like this: it's a new thing, mistakes are statistically expected, you make an honest one and plead "oops!" and we refund you, no doubt pointing you to resources on best practices and account throttling. As long as the customer takes the lesson to heart, everyone wins.

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