Website Charges User $100,000 (And REALLY Regrets It)
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- čas přidán 22. 05. 2024
- What would you do? 😳
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▼ Time Stamps: ▼
0:00 - What Happened?
1:10 - Is It His Fault?
1:54 - Sketchy Unlimited Billing System
4:29 - Not a New Problem
6:06 - Main Takeaway
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Thank you for charging me only five grand for your lack of security.
If it were me, they'd have to take me to court over this even if it were just $50. I ain't paying a single cent for fraudulent activity.
My expectation is absolutely "if it's a free tier, you'll shut down my stuff when I go over the limit". Because if I suddenly am going over a limit on the free tier, that means *I NEED TO KNOW*
And that's exactly what they are hoping you'll expect. Lawyers are well versed at finding ways to capitalize our laziness. Who actually reads the service agreement and of those that do, how many actually understand it? They are in business to make money. For them, putting measures in place to stop them from charging subscribers is counterproductive. It's obvious that this company lives by the "ask for forgiveness not permission" philosophy since the CEO stated they have a policy in place to wave charges.
@@explorenaked This is one of the reasons I have a policy of "I catch you taking advantage of me, I am gone."
i'm never gonna be able to stop shady companies from taking advantage of me. (I try, and I fail.) But once I know you're shady, I do not return.
For example, I will refuse Intuit products because they took advantage of me with Turbo Tax.
I'm actually quite skeptical that this would hold up in court to be honest. There are usually a lot of laws that are designed to make these kinds of misleading terms non-binding (for instance, if someone hid somewhere in the terms of service that "agreeing to this puts you $1000000 in debt" when there was no obvious indication that it would be the case anywhere else, that would just get thrown out in court regardless of if someone agreed to it or not)
Predatory pricing might just be their business model
60.3TB a day, that's almost 6Gbit/s, that really should be noticeable for every hosting company
I'm a web developer and deal with a lot of hosting issues but this one's new to me. None of the hosts I've dealt with on behalf of my clients, even the really bad ones, operate this way. The way they work is if the client reaches their bandwidth or CPU or other resource limits, they just get throttled and slow down. The price is a fixed rate per time period, usually monthly or annually, depending on the billing options and client's preferences. I'd never recommend a hosting plan structured this way and would warn my clients off of any such provider as I see such open ended billing as a huge red flag.
@@Seriously_Unserious I'm new to web dev, this scares me as I haven't hosted any websites yet. Do you know what are the best companies for hosting backend/ fullstack web apps with? I work with Django predominantly. Thank you if you do respond.
They noticed all right. $$$$$
6Gbps out of potentially multi-Tbps link aggs that probably have 50% or more spare bandwidth to allow for redundant paths would easily not notice at all until it was time to send out billing.
That cost per GB is obscene though.
@@Seriously_UnseriousYou never used google cloud or amazon web services then? Most popular cloud providers work like that. It's so your site can easily scale. It's honestly very common.
5:19 reading that post actually scares the hell out of me. "It hasn't happened that often so you should be fine" is NOT the kind of response you should be hearing from your server host.
Darker Scenario: Netlify intentionally attacked ts customers in hopes of getting the larger bill paid. 😈
very believable especially given they dont allow metered protections against it
You are wise.
It’s a win all around for them. What they get paid on their fraud is a win. What they don’t becomes a tax right-off.
Netlify and other similar "serverless cloud" hosting companies themselves are using something like AWS under the hood, so they're the ones who ultimately have to eat this cost (minus their markup). Therefore this scenario is not likely (who would cut off their nose to spite their face). It's an oversight not having protections against unexpected traffic spikes.
Especially since you have to trust them about the volume. It's not read from a meter you have access to (like power or water), nor is it coming from a third party. For all the user knows, the bandwidth is calculated by a random number generator.
@@russellhltn1396 You are wise. That’s what AIT Hosting does often.
In 2004 I almost hosted with them. Then I looked for complaints. Oh, wow! The jest: They would send bogus bills, then hold the client’s domain hostage.
A key takeaway is to NEVER have your domain registered with your hosting firm. NEVER.
1:00 i mean, this seems like the CS rep that talked to him has limited abilities. he probably lowered it as low as he could, which is why the next sentence was "i can raise this internally." i work in IT support and in customer service in general, there's a lot of stuff you're simply not able to do at lower levels. the correct response if one of those situations comes up is to offer to escalate, which is exactly what this person did. obviously the problem itself is nonsense, they shouldn't have to pay a dime, but i think the initial response was as good as you could have expected.
their pricing structure is 100% sus though.
Their pricing structure is 100% "host with us, and in time, we'll run a script internally which guzzles your website until you're past your free limit, and then charge you for the bandwidth".
crazy prices too
The support guy was great, but the company they work for is not.
@@Anankin12 They were great within the constraints that would assure they keep their job, but that makes them come off super cold, but that's the expectation they're held to. This wouldn't've been raised if it hadn't become publicly big enough.
Having worked in a few support positions like this before going back to college, can confirm. Often you're given a set of canned responses you're required to use (and can slightly modify as needed), particularly at tier 1. And they're often cold and impersonal too.
This happened to me with a hosting company way back in 2003. It was caught within a few hours but it still cost about three grand in overages. Predatory behaviour from hosting companies has been happening for decades, and does not result in retained custom... And these days social media will just out them as bad companies. Quite rightly.
If the user didn’t provide payment details, how was he still charged by the provider?
bill to name and address
They can put ur account in like a redzone, and make it unusable till paid. They can also js charge by name and address.
@@PhoenixDuhhHow's Javascript going to charge you?
@@chesshooligan1282 I believe the js should be "just"
@@chesshooligan1282 The site Netlify asks for ur address and shit. The site doesn't use Javascript for ur address but some payments can be processed through simple information due to situations such as these. But if u watch the video they explain that it doesn't seem that he was charged but more simply told that he owed them that much.
55$ per 100 GB is kinda insane. 😐
It's actually really bad. Like I have a virtual server I pay for and and each extra terabyte of bandwidth is an extra $5 a month. So for their garbage price of $55 for 100GB I could go over on my plan by 11TB.
@@Haarschmuckfachgeschafttadpole I know. The cheapest VPS I ever had was 0.50€/month with 1 TB of traffic included. 550$ for one TB is pretty much a scam. You could get a high end dedicated server with an unlimited 10 Gbit/s connection for that price.
Compared to that even AWS looks cheap, and they charge 90$ per TB
AWS Amplify charges 15 for 100GB
I use Cloudflare for all my sites and it has cost me $0 for over 500GB egress in the last month. Seeing this completely shocked me!
I wouldn't even consider them at this point because they clearly are not being honest.
How hard would it be to simply add the option to disable the site once a bandwidth threshold is reached. I have used a couple of different host providers in the past and they both had that option and it's been more than a decade since I used any host provider.
Sadly this is still quite common with especially the big hosting providers, you should always check and set them up if possible even if you are on a "free" plan.
Vercel actually just recently added this shutoff feature as a consequence of this shitstorm against Netlify.
Because then people would just use the free tier and get a free lunch. The thing is that "free" means you take the risk of getting billed. This is why certain host providers also limit how low you can set the threshold, so you can't just ride the free tier. Think like this - the paying customers also pay for the free customers. The "free bandwith" many providers give you, are actually FREE, they giving it away, its not included in the cost you pay (often you only pay for the server, not the transfer bandwith). This is why many host providers limit your "bandwith threshold" limit setting so it cannot be set lower than like 2x your bandwith limit, so they can squeeze some money out of you if your site gets popular.
how many retakes did you have to do from accidentally saying Netflix
Yes.
The main takeaway for me is certainly to cancel my Netflix subscription, or else they will charge me 5000 dollars if I accidentally leave my TV on all month.
@@grundeir ya I moved my site to Amplify and Hetzner
Well, both seem just as scummy.
i actually thought the video was about netflix for a second. like they watched a lot of shows on netflix and used a lot of bandwidth.
It is an intimidation tactic. Similar to Click Fraud where someone blows through your resources using bad faith. There is the compute equivalent, where your infrastructure gets compromised either externally or by a bad employee and the company gets charged a massive bill it can't pay and the company likely dies or is seriously hampered while they battle the bill and/or migrate their infrastructure to another provider. For some reason, even high level providers, like Amazon, last I checked, didn't offer a hard option option on limiting your compute costs.
The reason providers like Amazon doesn't allow you to put a limit, IS just so you can't get a free lunch and then set your cut off point at the free tier. Some providers DO allow you to set up a cut-off point, but the minimum cut-off point is in the payable region, so you can't just have a free lunch.
Perhaps this company…given the fact that they are so far behind OTHER COMPANIES….shouldnt have any customers at all.
That's why they do the "free" tier! A fool will think it's free without reading the fine print!
@@mind_of_a_darkhorse
But the way they go about introducing the ‘free tier’ is purposeful misrepresentation! They need their proverbial arse handed back to them…
Happens on aws and google cloud a ton. You forget to shut down a worker which you'd normally only run for a few minutes at a time, quick five or six digits. But, if you tell them it was on accident they are generally very understanding and not charge you.
A fear of runaway bills - be it from an attack, bug, or misconfiguration - is the main reason I avoid cloud services like this.
Even those that do have ways to set billing limits often don't provide hard limits, and the soft limits can take long enough to kick in that you're still looking at $100s of inflated bill.
Many thanks for the heads up about this issue 😳🥶
I had an account with a hosting service before I used password management. The credentials for that place got leaked and someone logged in and started up massive VMs, I assume for DDOSing or botting of some kind. Thankfully I got an email this happened and the company helped me shut them down. I wasn't charged.
this is bringing back memories of when the land line phone companies sent out insane bills to people using dial up, like maybe 2-3 hours a day i got a bill for like 2,000 for the month and threatened legal action if they did not fix it. guess enough people threatened to sue they feared a class action or got hit on by one as the bill was back to normal really fast.
Sadly doesn't surprise me any more then HP going full Printer's as a service
If I need presence on the web, I place a firewall, a web server and a database server - possibly on different servers, while avoiding the use of virtualization. Budget allowing, I add a fourth machine - purely for daily backups.
I know it is an old structure for a website, but the price of computers has fallen dramatically in the last 20 years, while Apache remains mostly free.
Regards,
Anthony
The hosting industry has a lot of issues like this.For example, they blame customers for his infraestructure security holes that hackers exploits.
$55 per 100 GB is a scam when they charge $19 for 1 TB (+ other benefits), which is $1.90 per 100 GB and is 29 times cheaper. They clearly want people to choose the free option and then bill them for extra data like how after you use all GBs of a phone subscription, you suddenly have to pay like 50 cents per megabyte, so it ends up being cheaper to buy a bigger subscription or pay for overage fee protection.
You're using the term bandwidth incorrectly. Bandwidth is how much data can be transferred in a given period of time. People here are being charged for the amount of data transferred. That is integrating under the curve. I really wish people would try at least use basic English terms correctly for these things.
Also, most companies state in their terms and conditions that... their terms and conditions can change at any moment without advance notice (or even a notice at all).
honestly, not surprising. The thing that makes these serverless providers really popular is the ease of deployment and scalability, so for a regular user it's always a risk, but for a company it's probably worth it (Vercel being by far the most successful one at that).
Safeguard the billing system but not the actual network infra?
Good video. I just checked my hosting service and found, much to my relief, I got "unlimited" disk space and traffic, which probably is not in fact unlimited (if you get close to a huge number I'm sure you'll get a call from them asking you to scale back and/or pay extra going forward) but at least avoids the problem of getting billed for past use as in this video.
What hosting provider are you with?
Big fan Joe! I agree 100 percent with the fact that they shouldn't have limitless charges, that's why they got 100k charge.
Here's other thing to watch out for: make sure that limit actually shuts down instead of just sending warnings
Honestly, if you were to set up a website with a specific provider, I’d check prices for other providers first before paying for anything.
ThioJoe FYI
Please say the name of the video that you're referring to when you point to where the name of the video is supposed to show because when you point to the next video it doesn't appear - BTW I watch your videos on my phone most of the time
I kinda don't blame the representative _too_ much. I imagine they have some liberty to give that 5% discount, but that's probably the extent they can do, and the culture there probably punishes raising an issue, especially around payment, to higher tier support. Then they're kinda expected to also present a very like, fake-friendly "professional" demeanor. So, that was probably the only possible message they could've given.
I wonder what they would've done had it never been brought public and got amplified. How many cases of this are there, where someone was just stuck with some huge debt, across various services with similar "convenience" features? No real way to know.
Of course, one can say that everyone should check all the terms and do all this research, but this is a losing approach. This sort of thing is intentionally time-consuming and many just don't have that time. If people did suddenly spend the time, it would just be made more time-consuming to do all this research individually. That's just how they play that game.
Ive been really mad at any hosting sites recently. I want to host a website, But its literally impossible on most of their sites to see ho much it will cost to renew. I don't care about the sale price. I want to know how much I'm going to have to pay later
save yourself the hasle and use porkbun for domain names
Google sites is free
The more I know about infrastructure, professional and consumer services and spaces, the less I want others to work for or on my stuff. It increasingly looks to me like I'm paying to get to pay more.
DigitalOcean billing garbage fire all over again..
it does seem very cheap
@@erich_ika DO and cheap??
They claim it was 190TB but how much was it really.
I can also claim I used 200TB last month but is it true.
That's not the owner of the website using it, but people visiting the website. If a 1MB file on a website gets downloaded a million times, that's about 1TB of usage. But a million people aren't going to visit a random website that no one has heard of.
Well. It's a matter of buyer beware. I wouldn't bother with a service like this and anyone who does is asking for it.
Wasnt there something about chinese search engine bots doing weird things like this? Not sure if this channel or somewhere else but pretty sure i saw a report on one of the Chinese search engines having dodgy bots that re-walked sites over and over without suitable delays.
i think ur talking about bytespider
Free and PAYG is completely normal, but not requiring payment info beforehand and not having limits is WILD.
This is why I just do my own web hosting. Gigabit fiber internet and a DDNS to keep the URL linked to the right IP address without having to pay a ton of money for a Static IP, using an old SFF office PC as the server. With as little content as I need to serve (literally one HTML page) it's way overkill, but I got everything for free except the internet connection.
My ISP charges $34 for a static IP, what happened to $2!? Unfortunately I do have to pay for it, and for the service I’m not getting a better deal elsewhere. Gotta love monopolies -,-
@@DozIT Right? Even doing it through a VPN, they charge a ton of money! I'm glad I don't actually need a static IP, free Dynamic DNS works for me.
@@eldibs it’s truly absurd, I use it for business so it’s just another expense that’s built into my pricing, still does not feel good to be robbed in broad daylight by my ISP!!
Hi btw love the content
Sounds like how Canadians ISP's run their services.
From what I hear from Canadians, absolutely
As a Canadian, I've never encountered this. I pay a fixed price for a set speed and get largely what I paid for. I get way better internet then almost all Americans I deal with online, and as I do a lot of video work for my CZcams channel ControllerHogz with people from the States, where we'll be streaming the gameplay to each other while recording commentary, I get a lot of issues from slowdowns, drops and freezes from my American counterparts, which I never get with fellow Canadians.
Now, if you're going to bring up cell phone providers and their data charges, oh boy! That's a conversation of it's own!
Never heard of this
I'm a Canadian and I've never encountered this. I run a gaming youtube channel and have to do a lot of large file uploads and stream games with others when having guest commentators on and never have any issues with bandwidth. My ISP charges a fixed monthly rate and generally delivers what we paid for. The only bandwidth issues I usually run into are with those coming from my USA based colleagues.
However, don't get me started on Canadian Cell providers! They do charge ridiculous rates and do per data unit charges much as phone use is charged per minute.
Data caps have been gone for ages on hard wired connections.
For those who don't know, this used to be a major issue where your bill could have up to an additional $100 dollars added as "overage/usage" charges.
This was eventually dropped in favour of a "unlimited" package for almost every plan
2:48 How would they "just start charging you" if you never gave them any payment info?
"you have 14 days before we send you to collections" probably
Yes, that's telling me I made the right choice by just using a Strato VPS. It has a fixed monthly fee, and that's it-everything is included, from traffic to storage.
One thing I have noticed with all major cloud providers - it is generally impossible to set up a hard limit on consumption. Oh, sure, you can set up "budget alerts" or similar, but they are a joke - by the time they trigger, you are already WAY over the set budget.
The fact that pretty much everyone (AWS, GCP, Azure, you name it) does things this way makes it feel much less like an oversight, and more like an intentional design feature.
This seems like the same exact way on how postpaid mobile carriers operate back in the day.
Did anyone else originally read the post as saying "Netflix just sent me a $104K bill" ?
I did! Hahaha! I was thinking that someone was really, really sharing their account! hahah!
3:17 did you almost say netflix?
Plot twist, the company may be spiking the traffic themselves.
Too many companies touting security measures when they have (almost) none at all.
damn netlify..
WOW
Thanks for this warning,
How can they charge you if you never provided a payment method in the first place.
your name and address
They send you a bill, if you still don't pay, they can sue you, report you to the credit ratings agencies like Equifax (trashing your credit score), and/or send debt collectors after you.
@@AveryChow Can I use fake name and address?
@@Fifasher2KYou can, but that's illegal. Might as well start using fake credit cards if you are going there lol.
@@Fifasher2Kyes but you they track IP address so they can definately reach to you.
They could easily have bots set up to go onto websites they host so they can make a fortune.
Another thing I noticed is the CEO was subtly blaming his Support Representative (No Doubt who was simply following Company Policy.) Did this Employee get Punished for simply following the Company line?
That is why I host my own site not on a cloud peovider.
Make a video about Sandboxie Plus.
I suspect that the attacker is the hosting company.
Yeah, that is same tier pure garbage move that mobile providers had with mobile data and going over whatever was in your package... like how often they were telling me how limiting use is impossible and fast forward to today, all providers have limit to how much you can go over money wise and all of them slow down your connection. It was just absolute trash tier money grab, they were hoping some will pay without complaining. And others got discount or they got past it for free, so it wouldn't go viral. But every service that has use limits, should have option to set limiter so you can't go over. If not, they are automatically trash tier in my opinion. This company was just abusing status quo, now that it backfired they might implement some limits or whatever. Hell, quite often it is just switch they need to flip and they already have it, they just don't want to use it... remember how impossible and heavily incompatible cross platform multiplayer on consoles was, how it would need some god tier work amount to get it going, right? Then one company forgot to flip cross platform switch to off and it just worked? Yeah, companies can be true garbage of humanity.
There are no iPads on google cloud host, clearly this dude was using a vpn. Good job that went right over their heads.
I use my own dedicated Server and if the traffic goes too high, the hoster limits the bandwidth. No FUCKING additionally costs.
I just deleted my account. Haven't used for 2 years. Thanks for the info.
They just lost so many customers because of one CSR. That person definitely lost their job. No doubt
The CSR was doing his just correct as instructed. The CEO backtracked to save the company's face and blamed it on the faceless employee. That CSR might have not even been informed that the whole bill was waved (and probably doesn't care).
U got news on windows 12 leaks and news?
I'd rather have my website be hosted in my home rather than other hosting providers
subtitles: "Netlify"
i use github to host my static sites
very suspicious CEO
"Don't get mad at us: we just so happened to be working on preventing this problem years ago!"
The internet is not safe for people to use! I'm now forced to use it just to get the base needed things done. Edge is a pain and win 11 too. Any hope for old people that does not have bucks to spend as I can't even get low-cost internet for seniors.
I would recommend trying to get Chrome for a better experience explorin' the web since it's well supported by many websites.
This soubds like an absolutr trash tier exploitative company now in damage control mode because the thing they do intentionally got recognized for the slime that it is.
I host elsewhere.
At worst a rigged scam to cause users to pay more; at best scummy business practices. Both you should avoid.
I'll never understand how people can justify charging for bandwidth/data. It's an infinite resource. It doesn't cost them money. Storage does but transfer does not.
A "serverless" service is usually the most expensive server you can rent. Just learn some basic Linux administration FFS 😅
People actually pay for these and not just abuse the free trials?
fr
Yes, because people can just casually learn "some basic Linux administration".
@@Akirasip Ooo someone's triggered 😁. Here, I'll trigger you some more:
For you to unironically make that statement, you either haven't bothered to try at all, or your intelligence is such that you really should be kept far away from any software development position.
@@Akirasip Nerds...
@5:27 aka for any gymbruhs : TRUST ME BRUH
The title definitely sounds like a Dhar Man pun.
CEO Attempts Damage Control INSTANTLY REGRETS IT!
**GASP**
It almost sounds exactly like the same billing plan ISPs have been using for years and years!!!
oh no netlify is going down
anyways...
Best option: just don’t use bad websites
I got charged that too
New monitors???
That initial cost can't possibly be real... feels like anchoring to make that "Reduced" "discounted" "forgiven" cost seem more palatable.
they probably the one's who attacked him
Netlify CEO needs to study basic English.
ATI does this fraud as well. Beware.
Every company sucks because their support sucks. I conform this is Roblox quality support, no future action taken.
Ooh! Free (loss of) money!
sorry but it is not like they hide anything. if you sign up for a service check the terms. There is no misleading stuff on the site. it does not say free tier and it also clearly states pay as you go. they probably bet on that too as how else would the finance a free tier? don't sign up for shit like this where you can't limit it.
i am not saying it is fully your fault but as an adult you are expeted to check the terms bevor you sign up for shit.
sounds like the company did that to him for profits. der
Pay a reasonable amount for a real web server.
interesting video :D
Ahh I read that thread on Reddit. It's such a stupid situation. Should not have been able to happen.
Thio Thio Joe Joe 🙂
Lol
Lmao
ThioThioJoJo, my favourite JoJo villain.
so bro where we can deploy our small websites for free??!!!
Imagine youtube will do same with popular youtubers.
what's Twitter ?
So, did he pay them?
No
bruh moment
Shitstorms on the internet are so cringy. They made a mistake. Mistakes happen. They cleared it. Nobody gets charged. Why the shitstorm? You're making a problem out of thin air. Consider at least half of the people writing that they planned to use netlify and now wont as trolling. And at least half of the people telling they were using netlify and will delete everything now wont do that or weren't even using it in the first place.
Probably all of them were using the free tier anyways, so the weren't generating any revenue for netlify whatsoever. Not a loss for netlify. Just another cringy shitstorm.
In Canada, this would be illegal, as there's consumer protections in place for 'Bill Shock' like this.