https://x.com/biilmann/status/1762924788350136475
When a spike in traffic can be automatically and absolutely classified as malicious, our platform is set up to block this. If it’s a new pattern we’ll add it to the automated rules and waive charges.
It’s tricky when the traffic in question is not clearly malicious, but could be an indication of a customer being successful.
In this case, any automatic block could mean ruining a launch, making a viral campaign go bad or disappointing fans of an emerging artist, etc.
For free users, my philosophy has always been that we can never go back and fix it if we ruin your moment of glory, but we can always cancel an invoice or refund a charge. Our support team does their best to identify these situations in advance of a user ever being made aware.
In the specific case of the user that posted about the large bill they received, we’ve been clear that while this was an incredibly rare situation, we should have done better.
A bill this large should never have left our system automatically and our support teams should not have treated this as a business user. We also should not have speculated that this was a DDoS attack, since in this case the traffic does match organic traffic from a region with lots of old devices.
While we do currently have notifications in place that make a user aware that extra bandwidth is being consumed, we do not currently have the ability for users to preset limits. We have assembled a team to immediately address this, and we will report back to the community ASAP when we have some more solid information to share around timing.
When me and Chris started Netlify almost a decade ago, our primary goal was that any individual developer should be able to just build and use our platform for free. This is why our core monetization model is centered around helping large companies be successful, not billing individual developers.
Since our inception, over millions of developers and thousands of open source projects have benefitted from our free offering; allowing anyone to build, deploy and launch their products to the world.
We sincerely apologize that in the case of this user, we stumbled in the delivery of this promise.Feb 28, 2024 View on X →
Wednesday, February 28, 2024