Every cloud makes this mistake easy! You have to manually activate billing alerts for everyone because they want you to spend more snd more each month.
I am still waiting for a cloud without these dark patterns. But that will never happen because it‘s leaving a big amount of money on the table by not being hostile.
Also the billing alerts is just that an alert. They should have something in place to put a hard cap on monthly spend. That way his free website would go offline when he's spent > $X.
I see there is a spending limit for the "intro" or "preview" plans designed for students, Visual Studio users, and resellers (the "hook" part in "hook, line, and sinker").
Not for actual cloud usage, like an actual pay-as-you-go plan where this would be useful.
Yeah, there are trial accounts and things but as far as I know, none of the big cloud providers have a way to say "Under no circumstances are you to charge me for than $X per month even if it means shutting down services."
And the alerts are not instant, at least with Azure - they run reports every 24H or so, and execute alerts every 24H or so. So even if you're careful, you can still be on the hook for a couple of days' worth of spend - which could be very expensive.
Pretty sure fixing deeply technical business to business transparent-but-potentially-terrible pricing models are pretty far down the priority list on things that will get them re-elected right now (not even counting campaign donations).
Contract dispute cases might clarify it, but probably not in the direction any of us is hoping.
Not it is not. It is common industry jargon for people who work with websites. Nobody else knows what it is. If you had to pick a term to sound as inoffensive as possible for fraudulent, deceptive conduct while still sort of capturing the thing without being abjectly false you could do no better than something that sounds like a colourscheme.
"Mr Politician what do you think about $big_co using dark patterns?"
"Mr Politician what do you think about $big_co engaging in predatory death-trap pricing schemes to defraud consumers?"
What is being asked in one of those questions is clear to everybody. The other is jargon and excludes the majority of the population from understanding the intended meaning. And note, you don't have to agree that it is "predatory death-trap pricing" at all. That is simply in the above sentence an accusation. Words have meanings. That the accusation be understood clearly by as many people as possible is important.
I appreciate your point that as many people need to know the meaning accusations and that meaning is important, and I agree.
However regarding your other claims- I dont work on websites, I know the term "dark pattern". so your assertion that "nobody else knows what it is" is false. You might then argue that I'm still in tech, but that's just another goalpost that I can reach anyway: if you google for the term you'll find vox articles, explainer sites, even newyorktimes articles using this term.
So yes, it's a common place term and your assertion to the contrary does not hold any water.
> Dark patterns - this sounds like a colour scheme you don't care for.
Or craft clothing for goths?
But the "dark" comes from its association with evil: "Defense against the Dark Arts", "The Dark Lord", "Turn to the Dark Side of the Force". It's a clear implication that the people are "selling their souls to the devil": knowingly doing something "a little bit evil" to achieve their aims.
We had a similar situation to Troy's where several thousand pounds was charged in a matter of days as a result of our misconfiguration of caching in our azure app services (before that month we typically had around £800 a month costs). We emailed Azure / Microsoft and they were happy to refund us. I don't think this is their intended business model.
My understanding is you hit your bandwidth cap and that's it, no more bandwidth.
(edit) looks like that's not the case, I'm sure I used to have to buy a second instance a few years ago if I did want to use more bandwidth that was allocated
Yes, their support is amazing. I can email the support address and have a real human who knows what he/she is doing reply within minutes or hours at most.
Exactly! It is quite refreshing to not have to battle past first line to find someone with the understanding to help. No shibboleth required. Cheaper hosting, too.
If you use up your monthly network transfer pool, you can continue to use your Linodes normally. That being said, you will be charged $0.01 for each additional GB at the end of your billing cycle.
Sure that's what i am doing. A beefy dedicated machine with no bandwidth pricing. But that also means i need to do everything by my own. I don't get any of the worry-free services of AWS.
If I leave my water running then go on vacation I'll have a huge water bill too. I don't conclude my water company is intentionally trying to overcharge me. The more reasonable conclusion is: building an alert system that addresses every customer need is hard. Most enterprises (where all the customer focus is) want minimal downtime above other considerations, including cost.
This is like you leaving your tap running slightly as you go on winter vacation so the pipes don’t freeze over.
But the water company does not actually allow you to install proper taps to regulate the water so you use duct tape to do so, and due to an earthquake something falls on the tap causing your duct tape solution to fail leading to a massive surge of water, leading to your massive water bill.
Did the water company cause this? No. Your duct tape solution wasn’t resilient enough because it didn’t factor in an earthquake. But I would be justifiably mad that my water company does not allow me to install actual taps, and allows unforeseen and unpredictable situations to make me run up huge bills that could otherwise have been avoided with a proper tap.
The problem with the cloud is that the entire Internet is in control of your tap and can choose to open it and waste infinite amounts of water with no way to implement a cap.
See you when your a even more inflexible (and old) guy who makes the bet on one horse, look i give a *hit about (or anyone else) oracle, what i care for is migration without problems from one provider to another.
Hard requirement: My image can run on it (freebsd and linux), no proprietary BS, no special stuff, give me vm-"harware" make it fast, make it cheap, make it reliable, that's it..that's it.
And ATM i like oracle hetzner and vultr at most. If one of those change to my disgust i change, no big deal...just some dns rewrite.
The Oracle cloud UI is extremely slow and terrible to work with. I'd prefer shenanigans every so often than having to deal with that crap on a daily basis.
Hetzner's cloud offer is limited but they limit your possible spending by default and it's very easy to set up billing alerts. I guess they mostly do it to ensure they get the money at the end of the month, but it's equally useful for their users.
Additionally Hetzner's egress pricing is a lot more cheaper. On hetzenr you pay 1,19€/TB (1.13$/TB) vs. 90$/TB on AWS. That's about ~80 time more on AWS!
I am still waiting for a cloud without these dark patterns. But that will never happen because it‘s leaving a big amount of money on the table by not being hostile.