This is exactly why AWS has relatively low default account limits, and you have to open a support ticket to raise them. It's largely to prevent run-away costs from surprising the customer.
I accidentally left a 24xlarge instance running for a month without realizing it and they looked at the activity and were totally cool about zeroing the bill for that instance for the month. Basically gave me us a $2000 credit.
It does probably help that I said I would be careful not to do that again and had already put in a CloudWatch Alarm to automatically power-off the instance after a set period of idleness before filing the ticket.
There have been so many stories of AWS accounts being “hacked” (actually they weren’t. someone posted their keys to a public github repo), the person panicking, then sending a ticket to AWS and then getting a refund. AWS support is excellent - especially on the business tier and above.
I will gladly pay the extra money for AWS than to even think about DO or even GCP for a money making project.
But more on topic: with Aurora/MySQL you can have an on-site hosted read replica from an AWS hosted database. That would be a cheap, easy real time backup solution if I were really worried about AWS screwing me over.
The good will generated by the stream of customer testimonials of this process we hear about is priceless.
The proposition seems to go something like this: it's a new thing, mistakes are statistically expected, you make an honest one and plead "oops!" and we refund you, no doubt pointing you to resources on best practices and account throttling. As long as the customer takes the lesson to heart, everyone wins.
This. It's fairly easy to setup from the provider side and easily solves this problem. Rate limits are fairly easy and can be automated based on criteria like account length/payment/abuse incidents. I think disabling the account is a little heavy handed unless it's brand new
