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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

#271

Post by thedougd »

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…

Cloud providers have a minimum spend for invoice billing. For GCP you need to spend at least $2500 a month for 3 months to qualify.

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

#272

Post by Xylakant »

CaptainZapp wrote: post #182
Xylakant wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Use a “synthetic” project owner with an email address that forwards to the group.

That could backfire, since nobody really feels in charge. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bystander_effect

But that's the same if you have multiple billing contacts. What is required is that the responsibility in the group of people that receive those notifications is clear.

Having multiple people that receive billing notifications is strictly better than having a single person - what happens if that person is on vacation, sick, overloaded? No one even has a chance of catching this. If at least one other person receives those increasingly important emails, they at least have a chance to catch this before it breaks.

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

#273

Post by __gtux »

sh4rks wrote: post #270
jabiko wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It loads fine for me in FF mobile.

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

#274

Post by nottorp »

rglullis wrote: post #171
nottorp wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meanwhile, in the EU the price displayed/set in the contract is the price you pay.

Meanwhile, the prices in EU are overall higher even after sales tax included... We could spend the whole day in this pointless display of "my dad is better than your dad", but can we just skip it please? Having lived in the US and now living in Germany for over 9 years, I have no intention to leave. But this idea that "regulations" could fix the consumer hostility of Big tech is naive at best and damaging at worst. T…

> Meanwhile, the prices in EU are overall higher even after sales tax included...

Regulation has its costs. Predictable.

> Cultural differences between and Europe can explain a lot better why things work different

Yep, the cultural differences that lead to even a "left" US government to be a lot more hands off than any EU government :)

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

#275

Post by Beltalowda »

darkwater wrote: post #269
Beltalowda wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's just a choice Google made. They can do it like Linode, they just choose not to.

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

#276

Post by kdumont »

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.

We went through a similar event last week. Droplets shut down and account locked without warning and because of “violation of the DigitalOcean user agreement”. Luckily, it was on a sandbox environment we use for testing before taking anything to production. All we had done was set up a simple keycloak server.

The real kicker is that they refused to tell us what terms we had allegedly violated because it’s “critical to maintaining our security systems.”

And they had “just conducted a manual review” and confirmed the suspension.

Then, after escalating further and a few choice words about how much I’ve spent on their platform, sure enough they conducted another “manual review” and found no issues.

I’ve really tried to avoid moving to AWS over the years, but I’m really reconsidering.

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

#277

Post by armchairguy »

RedShift1 wrote: post #91
invalidname wrote: post #80

This calls for a "me too" moment where everyone shares their Google is terrible and I'll never use them again. Here are a couple of my favorites from our company: https://medium.com/hackernoon/why-and-how-we-left-app-engine... https://dev.to/codenameone/google-play-kafkaesque-experience... There's this story from a couple of days ago which is shocking: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32538805 Google is a terribl…

Warning for that Medium link, that background color burned my eyes...

No post body was provided.

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

#278

Post by [deleted] »

RedShift1 wrote: post #91
invalidname wrote: post #80

This calls for a "me too" moment where everyone shares their Google is terrible and I'll never use them again. Here are a couple of my favorites from our company: https://medium.com/hackernoon/why-and-how-we-left-app-engine... https://dev.to/codenameone/google-play-kafkaesque-experience... There's this story from a couple of days ago which is shocking: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32538805 Google is a terribl…

Warning for that Medium link, that background color burned my eyes...

[deleted]

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

#279

Post by andix »

klohto wrote: post #142
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…

What is this fud? Both AWS and Azure won't suspend your account for several months, even with charges failing. Especially not if you're communicating with them. It's incredibly easy to get a hold of human support in case of the other clouds.

Ofc they don’t. Because they charge A LOT for the service. Even if the chance of the customer paying is just 30% it’s probably still a profit (it’s mostly licensing costs you pay with cloud bills, infrastructure costs are maybe 20% of it; hardware, electricity, cooling). And on the way they can charge a lot of late fees, that raises profit even more.

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

#280

Post by shortlived »

gorbachev wrote: post #191

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.

There is a rough start here

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32548441

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