> $0.005/hour

That's $3.60/month... seems similar to mail-in rebates—many people forget, and accidentally give Amazon some (mostly) free money.

Also, from later in this thread:

> FWIW, bandwidth overages at Linode and DO are $0.02 per GB, LightSail is $0.09.

It's these seemingly-tiny (but not-so-tiny when I'm running 60-70 VPSes) costs that kill when you get your first bill after a large traffic event.

Would anyone please tell me which of Linode, DigitalOcean and Vultr have cost ceilings? I looked at their pricing pages but couldn't figure out. They all claim that they have monthly billing caps for the hourly rates, but meanwhile, both DO and Vultr have per-GB charges if the transfer quota are exceeded, and Linode is silent on this on its pricing or FAQ pages. Can the data transfer charges be capped too? If so, what happens when the quota is reached?

> Would anyone please tell me which of Linode, DigitalOcean and Vultr have cost ceilings? I looked at their pricing pages but couldn't figure out. They all claim that they have monthly billing caps for the hourly rates, but meanwhile, both DO and Vultr have per-GB charges if the transfer quota are exceeded, and Linode is silent on this on its pricing or FAQ pages. Can the data transfer charges be capped too? If so, what happens when the quota is reached?

They don't for traffic. So you do run a small risk of something happening.

However, Linode at least pools your VPSs so if you have 100 of them and 20 of them "go over" the cap you still are often okay because of the other 80 that didn't "go over".

The truth is none of these providers provide truly hard caps. The difference is with Amazon/Google/Azure/etc you can realistically get hit with a 4 figure bill if something goes seriously wrong.

DO/Linode/Vultr I've never seen accidental "mistakes" causing that sort of thing and even an active dos/ddos attack that would cost you more than $100 in overages before they started null routing you.

It's not exactly free money because Amazon will surely reserve that IP for your use at any time. By sitting on Static IPs you are using AWS resources. Yes, operationally it costs them nothing, but there is an opportunity cost.

> but there is an opportunity cost

Is there?

Yes. They could sell the IP address to someone else.

But... they're selling it to you.

It's more valuable to be in use than to sell it to you. They are very limited on ipv4 space, so the charge is really a penalty for keeping that resource from another customer.

IPv4 allocation limits are still mostly a scare tactic to get people onto v6. I know dozens of people from my webhosting days with /12 and /16 allotments doing nothing that they pay peanuts for. This isn't a unique scenario.

That's not relevant, if I have 10 cars and you need a car ... then all that matters to you is that you need a car, not that I have 10 cars sitting there doing nothing. People sitting on IPv4 addresses don't care but new entrants cannot get new IPv4 addresses since they're all allocated.

> This isn't a unique scenario.

And this is exactly why we're running out of publically available IPv4 addresses.

I think the point is that there's a reason they charge you for it instead of letting you hold onto it for free.

They aren’t, unless you have an instance attached to it.

yes.

You're capped at 20 instances as well by the looks. Plus you'll get AWS 'dog shit' support included which is hopeless.

Will stick with Linode.

They put the caps on to help with the very problem you are all bitching about; provisioning a ton of resources and getting a big bill. It's very easy to raise the cap.

I wasn't complaining about that. I've had 2-3 day turnarounds on "everything is broken" events on normal AWS VPC. Always factor their support offering in as well.

What level of support did you have? I've been on developer or first-level business support, and generally get someone knowledgeable; only the timing changes.

The only bad experience I had was with SES - we got blocked by high bounce rate, sending to a test email that did not exist (specifically because it was a test email). It took two days for the special unblock team to unblock us, even though the general support guy I was talking to had responded a couple of times in that wait period.

Zero to start with, now business. Business is "ok" - sometimes takes a couple of attempts to get someone who knows what they are talking about.

I suspect that the VPS cap is more about discouraging large AWS users from spinning up a zillion to reduce egress costs.

The main purpose of AWS's cap is to prevent abuse.

Like mail in rebates it creates a moral hazard on the vendor's part.

The right thing to do is to just discount the product and just re-use IPs unless otherwise reserved. Mail in rebates can be ignored or "lost in the mail" and seems to happen often enough for me to have lost trust in them. I have little control over what the vendor does, so I would rather avoid vendors who think screwing with me is ok.

I don't buy products with mail in rebates and now I won't buy into lightsail (Presume this thread is accurate and Amazon doesn't fix it).

DigitalOcean also does this:

> due to the shortage of IPv4 addresses available, we charge $0.006 per hour for addresses that have been reserved but not assigned to a Droplet. In order to keep things simple, you will not be charged unless you accrue $1 or more.