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Comment by ipaddr | Hacker News Reader

With the threat of a much higher bill if done wrong. That $2.50 vultr instance provides a lot more like 20 gigs of storage nevermind security of a fixed bill.

You might be able to save a little, you might pay a lot more. Hedge your bet and use vultr.

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I actually use fly.io for the rare time I want to run something in the cloud, for exactly the reason that they allow you to pre-pay a fixed amount, and once that runs out, your instance gets shut down.

This means that I can't misconfigure my way to a three-figure-plus bill, which is hard to find in cloud providers.

I generally agree, though I would add that I think this depends a lot on the skill set and technical background of the person.

My gut feeling is that if someone is going to struggle with optimizing for a relatively fixed target like Fly (the billing is extremely predictable compared to some other offerings out there, if not completely fixed), the chances are that they won't be cut out to do double time taking on what is effectively a Linux sysadmin role.[1]

[1] I may be completely wrong

It's just as if "running a single container hands-off" and "having 1-n VPS" can be completely different things for different use cases.

Or just have billing alerts...

Billing alerts can tell you exactly when you have spent 4 figures after the fact. Using a VPS prevents 4-figure bills.

Actual billing caps are very hard for cloud providers to implement with the HA distributed systems clouds use for billing, and would carry a significant performance cost. Alerts are the best you can do if you take the variable costs.

Thanks for explaining that. I didn't think about the complexities of billing caps. Is there a contract from a cloud provider that even if they do go over the billing cap, since you set that as your "limit", they can't bill you for over that amount? I imagine that the responsibility for managing billing caps lies on the provider, and the consumer should be comfortable that they will not be charged above the limit they set.

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