Tangential question.
Has anyone compiled a list of these Google customer service nightmares anywhere?
I would love to give a Google sales person a link to such as an explanation why I will never buy services from them.
Tell HN: Google Cloud suspended our production projects at 1am on Saturday
191–200 of 531 posts
Re: Tell HN: Google Cloud suspended our production projects at 1am on Saturday
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
For the record, I was being sarcastic and do not actually believe it was the customer's fault. I believe this is an abhorrent way of running business by Google.
Right, but I think your sarcasm was misplaced. It is actually possible for customers to make a mistake. These mistakes are relatively easy to prevent. It could be that in this particular case there wasn't anything the OP could have done and they are simply unlucky. But that's very unlikely.
I have taken your advice and will keep this in mind when dealing with cloud providers in the future. That said, I still place the blame on cloud providers when things like this happen.
Re: Tell HN: Google Cloud suspended our production projects at 1am on Saturday
#193The same is true of DigitalOcean, fwiw. Shutting down machines used in production with no notice, outside working hours. I don’t know why these companies don’t care - they’re massively shooting themselves in their feet. Incidents like this turn customers off for life.
I actually managed to get my account suspended one day due to nonpayment. It was just a personal toy project and it was completely my fault: I was automatically filtering the mails into a folder that I didn't read until it was too late. If you look at the sheer amount of emails they sent me before suspending the account, Digital Ocean did everything right: https://i.imgur.com/ah13bEA.png They gave lots of warnings an…
I was using Digitalocean for something last year and for reasons didn’t have the money to pay for the bill when it was due, they always have one month of warnings. Ie if I paid one month late, everything was ok and nothing was ever shut down and they sent multiple emails during that time. I knew exactly where I stood, what I owed, when I had to pay by, when they would shut down services etc. That seemed reasonable to me.
Re: Tell HN: Google Cloud suspended our production projects at 1am on Saturday
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google is just horrible, when it comes to any form of support, paid or not. They make paypal look helpful by comparison. I really can't understand why anyone would use any of their services. Support counts. It's one of the first things I look at, when evaluating any external partner. What does it cost, how long does it take for it to happen, etc? Whatever anyone else says in this thread, that's what you need to deter…
Google tech is the best. Google invented k8s, their k8s cloud is the best in the world. There's nothing similar to GKE Autopilot. Similar things could be said about some other services. People want the best cloud and they hope that those issues won't affect them.
You can just use default K8 without any added service. It works well enough. There is no obligation to use GC for K8. There are a lot of good base K8 providers.
Re: Tell HN: Google Cloud suspended our production projects at 1am on Saturday
#195> They were "investigating" the issue and assured the project will not be suspended.
In my experience, and from everything I have read of others, Google's customer support is mostly a facade - Google will have given them a few buttons to press but they have absolutely no autonomy or authority, they are disconnected from Google and when things go wrong they cannot help you no matter how much they promise.
Re: Tell HN: Google Cloud suspended our production projects at 1am on Saturday
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
Regulation, full stop. The reason Big tech makes so much profits is because they have no accountability and at their scale, social shaming doesn’t work.
Right. Heavily-regulated industries like banking, auto and healthcare are known for being so much better at treating its customers like human beings...
I haven't heard stories about bank's AI deciding to close a person's account, take all their life savings, and refuse any explanation, contact or cooperation. Maybe regulation has to do something with it?
Re: Tell HN: Google Cloud suspended our production projects at 1am on Saturday
#197Generally, all cloud providers have two ways of engaging with and billing customers. One is using a credit card, which is very easy for getting started. The other one is having an established relationship with a sales / account team and setting up billing by invoice. Smaller companies sometimes don't understand that and stick with credit card billing for too long. Once you move to production and have your own custome…
> Smaller companies sometimes don't understand that [...] you should really make the extra effort
Let me get this straight. This company does everything they were supposed to, paid on time, and Google's own error cuts them off, and you are blaming them?!?
Re: Tell HN: Google Cloud suspended our production projects at 1am on Saturday
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
For the record, I was being sarcastic and do not actually believe it was the customer's fault. I believe this is an abhorrent way of running business by Google.
Right, but I think your sarcasm was misplaced. It is actually possible for customers to make a mistake. These mistakes are relatively easy to prevent. It could be that in this particular case there wasn't anything the OP could have done and they are simply unlucky. But that's very unlikely.
All - absolutely all - the evidence we have seems to show that Google was completely wrong - that a payment didn't go off because of a known Google outage, that the company then made a manual payment, but started to receive threatening messages, that they appealed to billing who told them they were safe, but then the site was cut off in the middle of the night on the weekend.
Your argument appears to be this: "Facts are unimportant: the customer is almost certainly wrong in every case."
Re: Tell HN: Google Cloud suspended our production projects at 1am on Saturday
#199Murfie died because of Google cloud costs. It's a bit of a long story, but from what I was able to piece together, a Google cloud service provider recommended some changes to the way the storage was done to save money. Mostly, because of those changes they got hit by a surprise $30,000 bill for data egress. It was basically the last straw for a company that wasn't profitable due mostly to cloud costs. It killed the c…
> data egress
Google, AWS are still charging people mid-2000s bandwidth prices. Its outrageous. Digitalocean's egress price is 1/10th of Google's cheaper egress pricing. Same with Hetzner. And with Hetzner dedicated servers? Its unmetered.
Re: Tell HN: Google Cloud suspended our production projects at 1am on Saturday
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
Regulation, full stop. The reason Big tech makes so much profits is because they have no accountability and at their scale, social shaming doesn’t work.
Right. Heavily-regulated industries like banking, auto and healthcare are known for being so much better at treating its customers like human beings...
Heavily regulated industries ANYWHERE in the world except the US work perfectly fine. Its because regulations are watered down in the US that they don't.