ofc. When things go viral they say "yes". But i would really love to get some number how many students and hobbiests got a 1k-2k bill and just paid it for the problem to go away.
Amazon is a publicly traded company. If they wave fees every time something goes wrong, investors would tell them something.
Have you read one even anecdotal case where AWS didn’t immediately give a refund to a student who made a mistake just by them asking?
I haven’t even seen reports on subreddits
By the way, there is nothing stopping AWS from reversing their trend of issuing refunds for big mistakes. "It hasn't happened in the past" isn't a great way to argue "it won't happen in the future."
They give you the tools. It’s up to you to use them. If that’s too difficult, use the AWS LightSail services where you are charged a fixed price and you don’t have to worry about overages or the new free tier
Because despite what everyone here is saying, before July of this year, there was no such thing as a free tier of AWS, there was a free tier of some of their services
If it is so easy to set up these automations, Amazon can easily set up this automation for you. Ask yourself why they don't.
Also a vital lesson from the big tech companies that sell a wide variety of services: don't get your cloud hosting from a company that you also use other services from.
I had to disable photo syncing because Google photos eats up my Gmail space. Having Amazon's cloud billing fuckup threaten your TV access is another level.
We clearly need to keep the option open to burn those bridges.
In any case, if I ever host anything, I'm going to host it from my home.
On serverless, I can enter numbers in a calculator and guess that running my little toy demo app on AWS will cost between $1 and $100. Getting hit with a huge $1000 bill and a refusal to refund the charges (and revocation of my Prime account and a lifetime ban from AWS and cancellation of any other services I might otherwise run there) would be totally possible, but I have zero control over that. Expecting to go on social media begging for a refund is not a plan, it's evidence of a broken system - kinda like those "heartwarming" posts about poor people starting a GoFundMe so their child can afford cancer treatment. No, that's awful, can we just be sensible instead?
If a server would have cost me $20 at a VPS provider to keep a machine online 24/7 that was at 1% utilization most of the time and was terribly laggy or crashed when it went viral, that's what $20 buys you.
But, you say, analysis of acttual traffic says that serverless would only cost me $10 including scaling for the spike, in which case that's a fantastic deal. Half price! Or maybe it would be $100, 5x the price. I have no way of knowing in advance.
It's just not worth the risk.