<story><title>It&apos;s tough being an Azure fan</title><url>https://www.alexhudson.com/2021/09/17/its-tough-being-an-azure-fan/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>audiometry</author><text>Oh me too. That horrible &amp;quot;mythical beasts&amp;quot; tutorial.   I thought I removed it, and then each month for the next two months I&amp;#x27;d get nailed for 50? dollars or so.&lt;p&gt;By definition, I don&amp;#x27;t understand AWS, so figuring out how to turn it off was nearly impossible.  AWS &amp;quot;support&amp;quot; didn&amp;#x27;t exist.  Stackoverflow AWS geeks were in high dudgeon that I&amp;#x27;d ask the question, &amp;quot;how do i disable this?&amp;quot; and would kill my question. Finally some kind soul did give me the trick to finding the last service to disable.&lt;p&gt;BTW the tutorial is absolutely useless. Just a thousand different incantations to repeat.  No real understanding communicated.  Felt more like an ad for myriad services.&lt;p&gt;0&amp;#x2F;10 would not recommend.</text></item><item><author>a5aAqU</author><text>&amp;gt; AWS isn&amp;#x27;t perfect but at least you have half a chance of working out what is costing you money through the billing console.&lt;p&gt;The first few times I used AWS for tutorials, something similar happened to me. I thought I shut everything down, but kept getting billed and wasn&amp;#x27;t able to find it without contacting them. It was just a few dollars, but I&amp;#x27;ve been wary about any services where you can&amp;#x27;t cap the billing.&lt;p&gt;Cloud platforms generally don&amp;#x27;t let users cap the billing, because those overages are good income for them. I prefer using services like DigitalOcean or Linode where you can be sure that your new site crashes for 15 minutes instead of bankrupting you.</text></item><item><author>smackeyacky</author><text>I once ran up a $15,000 bill on Azure completely by accident when trying to get one of their video processing services to work.  Once I figured out the service wasn&amp;#x27;t going to do what I wanted at a price I could afford, I tried to detach it and shut it down and thought I had succeeded.  I didn&amp;#x27;t.&lt;p&gt;The offending process costing me money didn&amp;#x27;t appear on the Azure console and I had no idea it was running, how to access it to stop it or even to know what was going on.  When it turned up on my bill I nearly had a heart attack.&lt;p&gt;Thankfully they let me out of it once I pointed out I was getting billed for something I couldn&amp;#x27;t see.  I appreciated that greatly but I&amp;#x27;ve never gone back to Azure and the experience scarred me so much I don&amp;#x27;t think I ever will.  This was about 4 years ago so more than likely they have sorted it out.&lt;p&gt;They keep reminding me I have $50 of test&amp;#x2F;dev credit on Azure through my Visual Studio subscription but it flat out frightens me to even try to use it.&lt;p&gt;AWS isn&amp;#x27;t perfect but at least you have half a chance of working out what is costing you money through the billing console.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>danjac</author><text>There are consultancies whose entire expertise and premise are advising on AWS billing to companies who already know AWS, so the idea that a newbie should be aware of whatever magical incantation to limit their spend is ludicrous.</text></comment>
<story><title>It&apos;s tough being an Azure fan</title><url>https://www.alexhudson.com/2021/09/17/its-tough-being-an-azure-fan/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>audiometry</author><text>Oh me too. That horrible &amp;quot;mythical beasts&amp;quot; tutorial.   I thought I removed it, and then each month for the next two months I&amp;#x27;d get nailed for 50? dollars or so.&lt;p&gt;By definition, I don&amp;#x27;t understand AWS, so figuring out how to turn it off was nearly impossible.  AWS &amp;quot;support&amp;quot; didn&amp;#x27;t exist.  Stackoverflow AWS geeks were in high dudgeon that I&amp;#x27;d ask the question, &amp;quot;how do i disable this?&amp;quot; and would kill my question. Finally some kind soul did give me the trick to finding the last service to disable.&lt;p&gt;BTW the tutorial is absolutely useless. Just a thousand different incantations to repeat.  No real understanding communicated.  Felt more like an ad for myriad services.&lt;p&gt;0&amp;#x2F;10 would not recommend.</text></item><item><author>a5aAqU</author><text>&amp;gt; AWS isn&amp;#x27;t perfect but at least you have half a chance of working out what is costing you money through the billing console.&lt;p&gt;The first few times I used AWS for tutorials, something similar happened to me. I thought I shut everything down, but kept getting billed and wasn&amp;#x27;t able to find it without contacting them. It was just a few dollars, but I&amp;#x27;ve been wary about any services where you can&amp;#x27;t cap the billing.&lt;p&gt;Cloud platforms generally don&amp;#x27;t let users cap the billing, because those overages are good income for them. I prefer using services like DigitalOcean or Linode where you can be sure that your new site crashes for 15 minutes instead of bankrupting you.</text></item><item><author>smackeyacky</author><text>I once ran up a $15,000 bill on Azure completely by accident when trying to get one of their video processing services to work.  Once I figured out the service wasn&amp;#x27;t going to do what I wanted at a price I could afford, I tried to detach it and shut it down and thought I had succeeded.  I didn&amp;#x27;t.&lt;p&gt;The offending process costing me money didn&amp;#x27;t appear on the Azure console and I had no idea it was running, how to access it to stop it or even to know what was going on.  When it turned up on my bill I nearly had a heart attack.&lt;p&gt;Thankfully they let me out of it once I pointed out I was getting billed for something I couldn&amp;#x27;t see.  I appreciated that greatly but I&amp;#x27;ve never gone back to Azure and the experience scarred me so much I don&amp;#x27;t think I ever will.  This was about 4 years ago so more than likely they have sorted it out.&lt;p&gt;They keep reminding me I have $50 of test&amp;#x2F;dev credit on Azure through my Visual Studio subscription but it flat out frightens me to even try to use it.&lt;p&gt;AWS isn&amp;#x27;t perfect but at least you have half a chance of working out what is costing you money through the billing console.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>TimTheTinker</author><text>I spun up an AWS service a year ago (while taking an AWS course I never finished) and haven&amp;#x27;t been able to find it or turn it off since.&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s $9&amp;#x2F;month until I disable that credit card, which I might do one of these days.&lt;p&gt;I thought they&amp;#x27;d notice and disable my account after I successfully disputed the charge one time, but the bills just keep rolling in each month.&lt;p&gt;This might be a bit overreactive, but... I&amp;#x27;m building an MVP for a SaaS app and I sure as heck am not going to host it on AWS.</text></comment>