You don't set caps low enough to stop if you want that kind of traffic. You set them higher to the point you're not willing to pay and can't be affording.
But with the blunt instrument of a billing quota, how do you distinguish between traffic going 100x because you're #1 on Hacker News and everybody wants to buy your product, vs somebody pwning your VMs and using them for a DDoS botnet?
Good question, that's up for for the developers, devops and sysadmins to decide. If they don't want it, then they dont. If they do, then they have to be smart with it.
Why does it have to be a blunt instrument? Why not an email saying “you’ve reached 80% of your specified quota and are about to be shut off” and if you’re #1 on HN and seeing incredible sales numbers you can just go change the quota?
Or just not set a quota on your business site, but do set a quota on your personal profile page that makes you no money.
> you’ve reached 80% of your specified quota and are about to be shut off
Because that might be very quick. Maybe you've got a 100x sign up boost in your SaaS app and you're missing out on the profit of your live?
Also, what do you want to shut down? EC2 instances, which might loose you data? Maybe no new instances, but your SaaS app needs those? Shut down all traffic? Delete your S3 files? All of those could be the possible reason for exploding cost and suddenly cutting any of those could be fatal.
Nothing is going to be perfect but if you have those concerns you can just opt out.
So many people seem to forget that you’re not being forced to use any of the options available to you. You can choose not to enable that. But right now you can’t choose the opposite.
What you’re describing is called “implementation details” and they don’t negate the utility of the feature overall.
It doesn't work for every use case, that doesn't make it worthless. I.e. if your homepage has (as here) 30TB traffic in a short time, that's not just a "frontpage of HN".
