Before everyone gets their pitchforks out - Person from the image posted on Hacker News, CEO replied and said this charge shouldn't have happened and they wouldn't be charging the client anything.
Phew, good to know that if this ever happens to me as a customer, I just need to go viral on HN. What a relief.
Yeah that's is an attack on Netlify and not on him. It's them that should have protections against this. I argue that the customer can't even effectively defend against this themselves if they're using Netlify, which is turn means a court would likely get them off the hook for anything that can easily be classified as a DDOS attack.
Hm yes and no. The user might have angered someone with their website and it might well have been targeted to them instead of Netlify as a whole? I can imagine them using that point in a court if that was the case.
If I were to host on such a service I'd probably put cloudflare in front. Especially as it seems to be static content. But I wouldn't host on a service with unlimited pricing anyway. I'd much rather see my hobby site go down than to have world-class uptime and pay 100k :P
But how do you go from 10GB monthly to 190TB without it raising any flags? Apparently their site had been up for 4 years and suddenly the usage spikes by nearly 2 million percent, and nobody thinks to check up on why, or to notify the user that they're using an extreme amount of data, way beyond what they usually do.
You’d think a competent company would have bots to scour this data and raise alarms, yet here we are.
Hell even AWS isn't this bad. You can go in and set the maximum data you're prepared to allow and then it'll simply just block any connection attempt after that point and send you an alert.
You just have to be aware that you might need to keep an eye on things and be ready to increase bandwidth occasionally in case of something like Black Friday, assuming that kind of thing is relevant to your site.
The user might have angered someone with their website and it might well have been targeted to them instead of Netlify as a whole? I can imagine them using that point in a court if that was the case.
They wouldn't really get anywhere with that claim though, even if it were true and they could find evidence, because the company claims that they actively scan for and protect against this sort of thing, and even they admit that it was a DDoS attack.
Good to hear but it sounds like if the person hadn't gathered so much traction on HN they might still have been screwed.
CEO said that forgiving bills for this kind of a thing is a standard practice, but how come this was the customer support's first reaction:
We normally discount these kinds of attacks to about 20% of the cost, which would make your new bill $20,900. I've currently reduced it to about 5%, which is $5,225.
If the customer support has authority to give 20%/5% discounts, this seems to me like the standard practice, and the CEO is probably just doing damage control because this became public.
In this case, customer service is giving roughly 80% / 95% discounts. Which I think bolsters your point even further.
When I worked in customer service I think the largest i was ever able to issue was a 10% discount. Even with managerial approval I don't think I ever saw anyone get more than a 25% discount, and that was for legitimate complaints, not the Karen style made up whining.
Before everyone gets their pitchforks out - Person from the image posted on Hacker News, CEO replied and said this charge shouldn't have happened and they wouldn't be charging the client anything.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39520776
Phew, good to know that if this ever happens to me as a customer, I just need to go viral on HN. What a relief.
Yeah that's is an attack on Netlify and not on him. It's them that should have protections against this. I argue that the customer can't even effectively defend against this themselves if they're using Netlify, which is turn means a court would likely get them off the hook for anything that can easily be classified as a DDOS attack.
Hm yes and no. The user might have angered someone with their website and it might well have been targeted to them instead of Netlify as a whole? I can imagine them using that point in a court if that was the case.
If I were to host on such a service I'd probably put cloudflare in front. Especially as it seems to be static content. But I wouldn't host on a service with unlimited pricing anyway. I'd much rather see my hobby site go down than to have world-class uptime and pay 100k :P
But how do you go from 10GB monthly to 190TB without it raising any flags? Apparently their site had been up for 4 years and suddenly the usage spikes by nearly 2 million percent, and nobody thinks to check up on why, or to notify the user that they're using an extreme amount of data, way beyond what they usually do.
You’d think a competent company would have bots to scour this data and raise alarms, yet here we are.
Hell even AWS isn't this bad. You can go in and set the maximum data you're prepared to allow and then it'll simply just block any connection attempt after that point and send you an alert.
You just have to be aware that you might need to keep an eye on things and be ready to increase bandwidth occasionally in case of something like Black Friday, assuming that kind of thing is relevant to your site.
They wouldn't really get anywhere with that claim though, even if it were true and they could find evidence, because the company claims that they actively scan for and protect against this sort of thing, and even they admit that it was a DDoS attack.
Good to hear but it sounds like if the person hadn't gathered so much traction on HN they might still have been screwed.
CEO said that forgiving bills for this kind of a thing is a standard practice, but how come this was the customer support's first reaction:
If the customer support has authority to give 20%/5% discounts, this seems to me like the standard practice, and the CEO is probably just doing damage control because this became public.
In this case, customer service is giving roughly 80% / 95% discounts. Which I think bolsters your point even further.
When I worked in customer service I think the largest i was ever able to issue was a 10% discount. Even with managerial approval I don't think I ever saw anyone get more than a 25% discount, and that was for legitimate complaints, not the Karen style made up whining.
Good to know, thanks for the info.
Awesome, thank you for the update.