I wasn’t aware of this till I read a company blog from BackBlaze. It is true that they are trying to differentiate themselves from others but this is instructive to have a clear understanding of the processes involved and dark patterns deployed to discourage “cancellation”. I have written earlier about the high costs of data-egress and therefore, you need to choose cloud service providers, very carefully. It is better to have a clear business justification around anticipated ROI around use of cloud resources.
AWS Free Tier: What You Need to Know Before Signing Up
With Google Cloud Platform and Azure, you’re at least somewhat protected from being billed beyond the credits you receive since they require you to upgrade to the paid tier to continue. Thus, most of the horror stories you’ll see involve AWS. With AWS, once your trial expires or you exceed your allotted limits, you are billed the standard rate. For the purposes of this guide, we’ll look specifically at AWS.
The post highlights these problems in detail:
There are a number of ways an unattended “free tier” instance turns into a bill, sometimes a catastrophically huge bill. Here are just a few:
You spin up Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances for a project and forget about them until they exceed the free tier limits.
You sign up for several AWS accounts, and you can’t figure out which one is running up charges.
Your account gets hacked and used for mining crypto (yes, this definitely happens, and it results in some of the biggest surprise bills of them all).
For all those who claim cloud will revolutionise the healthcare industry without alluding to costs (and carbon footprint, for example), are oblivious or giving out half-truths. Remember this image:
RadOncNotes 