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Warning – Google suspended GCP services for 'verification', lost my business

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Re: Warning – Google suspended GCP services for 'verification', lost my business

#111

Post by warbeforepeace »

tracerbulletx wrote: post #18
kkielhofner wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdotal but I listed a few graphics cards on Amazon with the same account I had AWS on and they booted me without any recourse or contact information. Very strange.

There really needs to be some more legal precedent around this stuff. In the commercial real estate leasing industry there are legal commitments and a framework of legal understanding to protect business owners or at least provide predictability. That needs to be applied to leasing computing resources given how much business flows through the internet now.

The big thing is not to use your cloud account for random other shit. Don't want it to get suspended for something else.

Re: Warning – Google suspended GCP services for 'verification', lost my business

#112

Post by ilyt »

fnordpiglet wrote: post #23
ilyt wrote: post #5

It's sad none (I think?) of the big cloud providers doesn't allow for prepaid account, it would solve both "our idiots thought that blocking long-term paying customers with no human intervention is a good idea" and "I woke up this morning with $20k AWS bill" problems

Aws has no provision for shutting stuff down for exceeding a budget (or at least when I ran services there). We would rather reverse your $20k bill and keep you alive. I ate huge write downs from small and big customers accidentally blowing themselves up. I remember on guy almost in tears because he knew he would be fired due to his screw up that blew up the bill. It made me proud to help him. Amazon has a ton of ser…

I'd still rather not have that issue in the first place. Throw next ~3 months of money onto prepaid account and sleep soundly.

Re: Warning – Google suspended GCP services for 'verification', lost my business

#113

Post by npteljes »

sebazzz wrote: post #89
twawaaay wrote: post #6

> I wish I chose AWS. Well... AWS has better support IMO (like actual people you can talk to). But I still chose to not tie myself to any of these platforms for anything critical. It requires additional upfront effort, but I can migrate all my applications off of AWS in a moment. There is no easy way around Google and Apple when it comes to your app staying available, but I am trying to minimise any chances I could b…

> But I still chose to not tie myself to any of these platforms for anything critical. It requires additional upfront effort, but I can migrate all my applications off of AWS in a moment. Then you are probably not doing "cloud native" development using their proprietary SDKs, so probably just running some EC2 (virtual machine) instance and RDS (database) instance. That is about the most expensive way you can use the…

How well do smaller / more traditional providers support auto scaling and various other "elastic" features of AWS? I only have experience with renting a "traditional" VPS, and some of the more modern AWS offerings.

Re: Warning – Google suspended GCP services for 'verification', lost my business

#114

Post by thirdusername »

userbinator wrote: post #46
throwaway892238 wrote: post #10

Google locked our company out of using our own domain on Google Workspaces because a former employee had signed up for a Workspace account using our domain, and we had no way to recover it. We literally manage our domain in GCP but they wouldn't accept that we own our own domain and thus won't let us use our domain with Workspaces, which screws you out of a lot of Google functionality. Never seen a company that was t…

It's now a matter of when we all move to AWS and Azure, not if. If you really think that the "grass is greener on the other side"... No, the real solution is to stay away from Big Tech and cloud in general.

I had an incident a couple of years back where AWS couldn’t swap a cancelled CC on AWS after we had for an unknown exception, and we kept getting overdue invoice alerts. and it was during December holiday season. AWS singapore has to escalate to US since it was a billing issue.

A false negative security alert from 6 months earlier was the cause, which had blocked CC changes. It took months to resolve but it was manageable.

I know from first hand from a different experience that you can be months overdue with tens of thousands of missing payments on AWS, and tens of thousands in recurring costs without them closing your account. You can effectively run a quarter of credit line from your hosting costs without any issue if you need that.

Your account manager doesn’t even start raising it personally for the first 3 months, they are very easy to deal with.

Re: Warning – Google suspended GCP services for 'verification', lost my business

#115

Post by thirdusername »

more_corn wrote: post #94
f0e4c2f7 wrote: post #14

Wow I'm really sorry this happened to you. I do believe your conclusions are correct about AWS. Azure generally seems fine too. Google's aversion to customer service makes them extremely dangerous as a cloud provider in my mind. This also goes for other critical business services, like Gsuite (I know! It's convenient). If you have GCP or Gsuite now and you're trying to evaluate how big of a deal it is my suggestion w…

I’ve had phenomenally good support from AWS. I recently had a problem where a nat instance was opening more than 55k simultaneous connections (don’t ask) and AWS support helped me track down which ecs service it was coming from. I’ve had utter shit support from GCP (mostly around “hey can I get this API limit raised). My best support from GCP was from our customer evangelist. He actually knew stuff. His turnaround ti…

Also currently actual AWS staff is answering on the new community support forum re:post, I’ve been taking full advantage of that.

There are some things which AWS suck at unless you have an enterprise support plan, like having a deep review of a technical issue in their products, and having visibility into product bugs in general.

Even then after reporting a significant issue like Aurora query execution being non-deterministic in a very specific case, I only found out it was solved months later after working around it from reading patch notes.

Re: Warning – Google suspended GCP services for 'verification', lost my business

#116

Post by thirdusername »

grog454 wrote: post #54

My first experience with AWS was around 2013 when I accidentally left a (cheap) ec2 instance running for months after I was done experimenting with it. Support refunded me no questions asked. Fast forward 2 years and that experience was an important factor in my decision to run servers costing 6 figures annually with AWS over their competition.

When I was early in my career freelancing my AWS account was shut down for no payment for over a year, more than half a decade later I re-opened it through support and they wouldn’t even let me pay my old bill.

I’ve been able to reduce reserved instances when the market has turned unpredictable.

AWS isn’t a pushover, not even a little bit. Dealing with them externally has just been a good experience with professional understanding and a flexible business sense.

Re: Warning – Google suspended GCP services for 'verification', lost my business

#117

Post by thenickdude »

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote: post #99
fnordpiglet wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aws was/is extraordinarily careful when it comes to suspending accounts, even for non payment. Only verified malicious use of their services resulted in suspension. There are probably edge cases I didn’t get exposed to, but stuff like this didn’t happen and if it did I’m 95% certain they would take it very seriously and resolve it asap favorably to the customer. Amazon has a leadership principle around customer obses…

That wasn't my experience. They banned me while I was trying things out, for some baseless suspicion of an infraction. Just rented some cheap server from Hetzner, did the job well.

Hetzner banned my account on day 2, lol. At least they didn't charge me for my server (that billing would have happened at the end of the month).

A friend of mine had the same experience with them.

Re: Warning – Google suspended GCP services for 'verification', lost my business

#118

Post by mathverse »

justinwp wrote: post #44
autotune wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want to know what the ban was for. What if the ban was due to a crypto mining operation? All I am asking for is a little more context before pointing any fingers.

One of the apps by this developer: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/cuff-video-chat-make-friends/i...

And this is worthy of mentioning because?

Re: Warning – Google suspended GCP services for 'verification', lost my business

#120

Post by zinekeller »

throwaway892238 wrote: post #101
mgcunha wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry to hear that happened to you. They do lock out domains that were previously registered and still active from being re-registered [that's happened to me too]. Their Support should have offered you to contest and take over. It's not immediate [takes several days to go through the process and the departed employee will delay things] but if you can demonstrate positive DNS record control and go through the motions…

> if you can demonstrate positive DNS record control and go through the motions with support it does get done and you gain control. nope. made the DNS change. went through the motions. even got at call - at 5AM Eastern Time - from a support person to ask me one question, then "I need to confer with so and so". several emails later, new support people asking the same questions. but because I cannot answer "recovery qu…

> attestations of proof of who we are be damned, they just follow their robotic script. so we're just screwed.

Hire a lawyer and send a certified letter with return receipt requiring them to explain their decision, and prepare to sue. I'm presuming that this is a B2B dispute, and I notice that a lot of HN people are (rather counterintuitively, considering Y Combinator owns HN) scared of hiring lawyers. Unless that the records show that your old employee is the recorded administrative owner of the domains (this unfortunately happens frequently to small businesses), this should resolve this issue.

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