tylerlindell

Invalidation is happening a lot and it looks to be happening on images specifically. it seems like they are being directly invalidated which is ringing up the bill. I have it set to only invalidate manually – but that’s being ignored or disregarded when it comes to images for some reason. I recently removed the {uploads-dir} from the automatically upload files as well as removed *.jpg;*.png;*.gif from the list of file types to update because the invalidations seem to be heavily focused on images.

I use a different app to manage image -> cdn which uses object versioning and it has never invalidated anything which has allowed my cloudfront bill to be acceptable, once I started using this plugin though… it’s like the lid has come off and cash is spilling out specifically wrt CloudFront invalidations.

I want to use object versioning because the cost seems to be much more negligible than directly asking for an invalidation.

Here are the docs regarding object invalidation using cloudfront: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudFront/latest/DeveloperGuide/UpdatingExistingObjects.html

What are your thoughts?

Sadly, I too have faced this same issue of a surprise bill for invalidation. It would be interesting to see a message pop up saying.. “Wait! before you spend a load of cash through trying to clear your cache, we’ll save you the trouble. You can go ahead with this invalidation (see here for pricing), or we can add object versioning (free), or you might want to check this box over here that’ll protect you from a big surprise bill later on.”

I realize this sounds a little sarcastic, but it sounds like that might be a nice feature to keep customers from being surprised. I recently paid for Pro W3TC hoping to make my page faster.. so far so good but now I must pay double+ to learn how to use it… I’m frustrated that this happened but it would be really nice to see little helpful notes like this sometime to save people the hassle in the future.

I figured it out. I had the Amazon Web Services plugin installed so it seems like w3tc was trying to use the AWS sdk version that was installed from that plugin (I think). Once I removed that, there was a second issue. I use UpDraft for backups which uses it’s own set of keys for AWS which only have access to S3. This time the message was clear, it said the user’s name and that it didn’t have access to create a distribution. That’s how I knew to update the creds for both plugins to use the same set.

It’s unfortunate that I can only use one set of AWS creds bc I would rather have fine-grained control over authorization.

It is fortunate though, that it’s working, now. Thanks