Storage is almost never the main thing racking up bills so it should be handled in a different way. If you hit a limit you can't store any more data but everything you have stays there and readable.

This is more about compute, VMs, LLM inference and services like hosted database. These are all safe to stop if the system triggers a normal shutdown when costs hit a limit.

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hnlmorg 22 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

I’ve recently worked somewhere where S3 read access was the second largest AWS cost.

I’m not saying it’s normal. Just that AWS is complicated, and people use it in a plethora of ways, thus billing caps aren’t easy to get right either.

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gpt5 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Yeah, the storage point made the whole case weaker.

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zbentley 37 minutes ago | parent [-]

I dunno, the largest accidental AWS overages I’ve triaged in my career (at very different companies) were all storage. Dangling EBS, forgotten S3 accumulating data after a deletion cron broke, incompletely retention-policy’d CloudWatch buckets, Aurora snapshots…the list is pretty long.

“Large” is relative to the business of course, but the biggest storage-related overages I’ve personally triaged are in the high $100ks to low $millions per month. Colleagues have heard of orders of magnitude more costly.

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lazyasciiart 27 minutes ago | parent [-]

That’s not storage costs, that’s activity adding to storage used. The question is whether it would be cheap enough for them to keep all your existing data frozen until you paid the bill.

	▲	hnlmorg 19 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		You’re literally agreeing with the GP but phrasing it like they’re wrong.