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Tell HN: Google Cloud suspended our production projects at 1am on Saturday

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Tell HN: Google Cloud suspended our production projects at 1am on Saturday

#261

Post by unity1001 »

mrtksn wrote: post #239
unity1001 wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

If I recall correctly, there was a story on HN about Hetzner threatening to shut down an "unmetered" server for using too much bandwidth. here it is: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32242987

From the discussion:

> - The link says "my friend got this", so even the person who authored that post isn't claiming to have received this notice. This is a second hand report, at best. For all we know, their friend received this notice years ago, and mentioned it to the OP, who didn't realize it was old news.

There have been people confirming in recent HN discussions that they were using full 1gbps of their dedicated box for a while since Hetzner declared their true-unmetered policy a year or so ago.

Re: Tell HN: Google Cloud suspended our production projects at 1am on Saturday

#262

Post by alphaomegacode »

For a company that operates at such massive scale for their own services, Google has some glaring oversights when it comes to enterprise services.

I have a friend who volunteers as a webmaster for a charity org and they kept getting notices about their impending shut down of G Suite and the need to move to Google Workspace. The problem seemed to be a credit card and yet, when my friend was showing me on his laptop, there was no place for them to enter credit card information. They ended up losing all their email and Drive & Docs access for days and couldn't even get an email or phone address - paid or not - to address the issue.

After getting burned at a mid-sized business I used to work at with Angular 1.x and Google Glass, I learned that Google apparently sees business services as experiments rather than long-term investments.

Re: Tell HN: Google Cloud suspended our production projects at 1am on Saturday

#263

Post by rglullis »

lelanthran wrote: post #249
rglullis wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the infraction was intentional and with the sole purpose of getting unfair competitive advantage in the market, yes, the company should be dissolved for it.

> If the infraction was intentional and with the sole purpose of getting unfair competitive advantage in the market, yes, the company should be dissolved for it. My memory may be hazy[1], but I don't think Dieselgate was ever proven intentional; your proposed policy wouldn't have kicked into effect anyway. [1] So feel free to post links to the findings if you have them handy

The whole thing started because the EPA reported that the software that controlled fuel injection on diesel engines was intentionally programmed to detect if the car was running in special lab conditions. It's on the first paragraph of the wikipedia page[0].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal

Re: Tell HN: Google Cloud suspended our production projects at 1am on Saturday

#264

Post by cft »

hazbo wrote: post #124

A few years ago I was working at a startup and we had just started moving some stuff over from AWS to GCP. Things were going pretty good with GCP until one day they pulled the plug on everything with no explanation. It turns out that our company credit card details had been fraudulently used without our knowledge. The criminal had decided to use the card to buy Google Ad Words or something like that - this is the sam…

For Google a customer is a data point in their machine learning set (hopefully weighted by revenue). The decisions are made by a ML model. If you treat your relationship with Google as such from the beginning, you can extract some value if you use Google for near zero value use cases - spam/marketing emails, disposable non-real time computations, Adwords/AdSense on spammy sites.

Not sure if having an Android phone is safe enough for critical use, because it's entirely tied to a Google account.

Re: Tell HN: Google Cloud suspended our production projects at 1am on Saturday

#265

Post by gnfargbl »

intellectronica wrote: post #115

Generally, 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…

It would be nice if Google actually told their customers that this is an option. As a result of your post, I realise that I quality for invoiced billing and have just applied for it. Thanks!

If I had an "established relationship with a sales / account team" then yeah, perhaps I would have been informed. Unfortunately my experience is that unless you're spending above some relatively high threshold (>$10k/mo? >$100k/mo? >$1m/mo?) then Google don't prioritise your business.

Re: Tell HN: Google Cloud suspended our production projects at 1am on Saturday

#266

Post by black_puppydog »

Nebasuke wrote: post #252
jquery wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds more like they looked both ways, they saw a car, they made eye contact and the driver gestured for them to cross, then when they began to cross the driver ran them over. And now they’re getting advice to never cross streets as a pedestrian. Sound advice can also be victim blaming.

I got hit by a car in a situation similar to this. They made eye contact (I thought), were slowing down, and still hit me anyway by accelerating, despite me having the right of way on a bike. Turns out it was the first time they used the car, 1 minute into the drive and their focus was somewhere else. I would say the advice here is, wait until the car is basically stopped before you cross the street rather than trust…

> wait until the car is basically stopped

you mean like an email literally saying they acknowledge the situation and won't suspend your account?

Re: Tell HN: Google Cloud suspended our production projects at 1am on Saturday

#267

Post by FBISurveillance »

cinntaile wrote: post #219
dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, it was exactly finance in the case of one of my clients. "Dear Mr dvfjsdhgfv, we're receiving invoices from this Hetzner company for some ridiculously small amounts each month which adds to our overhead, could you kindly ask them to bill us yearly? Thanks!"

It's quite unfortunate that your parents decided to call you dvfjsdhgfv.

Just passing feedback from my peers at the surveillance van: fantastic joke.

Re: Tell HN: Google Cloud suspended our production projects at 1am on Saturday

#268

Post by InCityDreams »

paganel wrote: post #140
InCityDreams wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Europe is, in the end, too afraid to do it (bar some relatively minor extra taxes that Big Tech is all to happy to pay as long as it's not made legally liable in other ways), https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antitrust_cases_against_Goog... $8 billion afraid. If you consider that 'minor', i rather suspect you are being anti-EU just for the hell of it.

If a small butcher-shop round the corner sells the wrong type of meat the authorities first close his shop and then apply the fine, or close the shop and apply the fine at the same time, thing is butcher shop is getting closed no matter what until the issue is resolved. As such, yeah, 8 billion euros/dollars is just the cost of doing business as long as the Google "shop" (or any other FAANG shop) is not closed until…

"Wrong type of meat", or unhealthy meat. I think your argument would depend on the distinction (as much as "the authorities" ie working on a local level, vs "The EU", working on a National, and Continental level).

Re: Tell HN: Google Cloud suspended our production projects at 1am on Saturday

#269

Post by darkwater »

Beltalowda wrote: post #235
helsinkiandrew wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hang on - what would you do if you were running a business with hundreds of thousands of users and someone doesn't pay? Was it an accident? has the customer gone bust, or died, or are they trying to defraud you and get a month or two of free service. Credit cards are exceptionally finicky, very susceptible to fraud, and payment can often fail. They're great for one off purchases and services that don't matter if they…

I actually had some payment troubles with Linode a few months back; I had cancelled one of my bank accounts and forgot the CC there was tied to Linode, and because credit cards are not very common where I live and it can take a bit to request one so I couldn't "just" pay. Oops! 100% a mistake on my part of course; I emailed Linode, explained the above, and they said "sure, is 3 weeks time enough to sort it out? I've…

> If Linode can do it, then surely Google can.

No, because Linode is using humans to interact with you. Google will not humans in those situation, their mantra is to automate everything so they can scale up with minimal human effort, even when it doesn't make sense to scale up that way.

Re: Tell HN: Google Cloud suspended our production projects at 1am on Saturday

#270

Post by sh4rks »

jabiko wrote: post #79
jamespwilliams wrote: post #19

The 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…

Is it just me, or does imgur never load on Firefox mobile?
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