I blogged about it already https://jeena.net/suprice-bill-object-storage but thought it's a interesting topic for the PeerTube Admin Chronicals.

To fix buffering (see PeerTube Admin 31: Fix buffering when viewing from other continent) I put my PeerTube videos into a Vultr object storage on the west coast of the US.

In the beginning it was cheap, $6 a month for my 150 GB and almost no traffic. Then they changed to $18 per month and I wanted to move it but didn't have the time.

Today I started investigating and saw that in April I had a bill of $54, while the only thing using Vultr is my PeerTube instance. I checked the logs and there was nothing happening in April, in fact it was a slow month with just a couple of people watching some videos.

But Vultr said 4 TB were downloaded, so it seems some bot net was downloading all my videos over and over again for the whole month and because I never looked at the bill which comes every month and gets payed automatically from my credit card I never realized this outlier. Also I have no way of understanding what happened because Vultr dosn't give me any logs for who accessed the public bucket.

So theoretically I could have had bills of thousands of dollars and there seems to not be a way to stop serving things from the public bucket automatically once something happens, they just keep serving and bill you, there seems to not be a alarm available either which would warn you, just the bill.

That makes me now very anxious, I never meant this to be some investment or business, so I can't spent so much money every month on it and I can't even prevent it now either, god damn it. It's just a mini instance where I share private videos with family and the occasional public video here and there.

I need to find a way the bills not just balooning like that by themselves. I see Cloudflare's R2 doesn't charge for egress and hopefully they protect themselves from meaningless bot downloads somehow.

Or just move it home here to Korea, I have compute and storage enough at home, the only thing is the buffering in Europe, for that I would need to find a different solution.