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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

#141

Post by bruce511 »

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.

You are experiencing a false equivalence here. You are attributing outcomes (as being the same) as being the result of some common factor, when the cause is a very different factor.

Google is big. As are Microsoft and Amazon. Google has bad customer service, therefore so do Microsoft and Amazon.

You tried to x in the cloud. You had a bad experience. Therefore the cloud is bad.

In reality of course big companies are not the same. Bigness does not imply sameness. Google support is well known to be rubbish. Microsoft and Amazon support are well known to be excellent. If support matters to you (like when things go wrong) then take that into consideration.

Same for the cloud. There are advantages and disadvantages sure, but providers are different. Google likes to kill services. Others don't. Startups vanish as often as they appear.

Tech is not the only place where you see this false equivalence. All politicians are the same. All fast-food is equally crap. All cars have the same gas mileage. Turns out, no, they are very different, but you need to dig deeper to understand their differences.

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

#144

Post by 1123581321 »

htrp wrote: post #96
1123581321 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon and Azure have better support for everyday developers, especially around issues like this. Have used all three. It's not just a running joke--Google is culturally allergic to staffing support seriously for anything but ads.

You can tell which part of the company makes money?

Yes, but cloud has such a good chance of becoming a profit center. They should be developing it and staffing it accordingly now. Amazon was able to think ahead in this way. Amazon also has significant cultural weaknesses, but their drive to improve the user experience forced them to stumble into principles of good customer support. Google has this drive to test and improve the interface only.

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

#146

Post by spopejoy »

0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #97
wingleader wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had the exact polar opposite experience on any company running systems with paying customers. Usually it's "don't care what it costs, just fix it" which lines well with AWS' behaviour on this. When downtime costs tens of thousands of dollars _a minute_, people tend to stress less about some inefficiencies like this

And those customers can choose to ignore the emergency billing shutoff. The rest of us need assurances we do not have an unlimited liability that could strike. My potential spend is under $1k per year. Vastly different cost considerations at play.

One qeustion is whether cheap cloud services even make sense for an AWS, as opposed to a Dreamhost (targetting smaller businesses/individuals specifically) or Hetzner/DO.

I would imagine AWSs profit is in servicing large clients using lots of CPU/bandwidth, so the only reason to even bother with small clients is some kind of low-probability funnel for the occasional startup that blows up. Or just a loss-leader strategy for market domination (but only if that small-biz experience is vastly superior to other clouds' offering).

One way or another, small businesses should never trust that big businesses are going to look out for them, for any number of "rational" reasons on the big biz side, especially if it's not clear you're their bread-and-butter.

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

#147

Post by EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK »

thenickdude wrote: post #117
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They are really sensitive to two things: address confirmation, in case you want to avoid 19% VAT, and mining for SIA)

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

#148

Post by t00l00 »

Does this support depend on a region?

I’m here in UK, my bill is sub £10k/mo and literally today few hours ago I had an hour with Google engineer discussing use of their MultiClusterIngress to mix GKE standard and Autopilot to handle spikes extremely fast. Afterwards dude sent me docs and his project he used as an example. It’s the second time this month: we don’t even chat about any specific bugs, more about my architecture goals.

I also have an account manager and she’s currently working on making discount rates from our contract to work with our new hierarchy of multiple billing accounts, some VAT paying and some not, that my finance department requested.

You also can have backup payment methods? I think we have DDs as a default and then CCs as backups.

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

#149

Post by t00l00 »

snird wrote: post #105

Google and GCP isn't capable or want to provide support to customers who pay less than ~$20k a month. Don't ever use GCP if you're not a big enough enterprise. Just as you should never buy a Dell laptop as an individual consumer. I'm sorry this happened to you, I hope someone will learn from your experience

I’m £7.5k/mo in UK: have a named account manager, and an engineer who spends 2h/mo discussing whatever I want on a Google Meet, and bugs I can email directly. Got invited to their Leeds office to say hi and spend a day with them.

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

#150

Post by heresjohnny »

I was tempted to use Firebase for a new project because it looked so easy. I’m fairly fluent in Angular and it integrates extremely smoothly, so at a surface level it would be the perfect choice for the backend.

Stories like yours – thank you for sharing – plus horror reports about sudden 20k bills have prevented me from taking the “cloud” leap. I’m very glad I didn’t, especially because I also learned lots by setting up a web server and the application layer myself.

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