Google Cloud Nightscout » Invoice for traffic to China
I thought this was supposed to be free. I followed all the instructions when setting up my site.
Yet, I have been invoiced a non-zero value. Why?
There are crawlers everywhere scanning all IP addresses looking for vulnerabilities.
When a crawler contacts your site, your Nightscout asks for either a read token or the API_SECRET. That request for a token or the API_SECRET is an outgoing traffic.
Any such traffic to either China or Australia will result in a cost while traffic to all other geographic locations will only trigger a cost if the total traffic is greater than 1GB per month.
The traffic caused by crawlers is very small. The cost reported due to this has been about $0.01-$0.02 (USD) per month.
You can use a cost table to confirm that is the reason for your non-zero invoice. If you see an unexpected cost, please tell us.
We are working on adding switches to let you block traffic completely to China or Australia. Hopefully, it will be available soon.
