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Google Cloud suspended my account for 2 years, only automated replies

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Re: Google Cloud suspended my account for 2 years, only automated replies

#51

Post by tonymet »

_drg9 wrote: post #2

I had my GCP quota algorithmically set to 0 after spending 6 months working with them to launch a startup. I went through a ton of hoops to get approval for our quota. We sent them system diagrams, code samples, financial reports, growth predictions, etc. It was months of back and forth. I'll also add that it was very annoying because they auto-reject your quota request if you don't respond to their emails within 48…

A colleague had a similar quota issue. 4 times quota restoration request was rejected. Upon the final request he put “women owned startup helping underprivileged kids” and it was approved.

It can’t hurt.

Re: Google Cloud suspended my account for 2 years, only automated replies

#52

Post by mystraline »

3eb7988a1663 wrote: post #37
mystraline wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, no. MS is the same network were even their lead engineers answer "well, uhh create a new account and hope you're not banned", when it comes to fixing a illegitimate ban issue. None of the biggies are good. None of them. You're better off building your own data enter. Can't believe I'm saying that, but I am. And it doesnt have to be acres and MW and water cooled. It can be a 42U rack. Hell, I'm a homeowner and…

Now I am curious what is the realistic price a business would expect to put down for a full rack. Say UPS, switch, 4-8U storage, and the rest CPU compute. Without entertaining GPUs, I bet you can get very respectably speced 1-2U servers for $5k a pop. So few hundred thousand probably gets you just an unbelievable amount of horsepower.

You can get a petabyte for like $14k now. Make a massive SAN. Even 10G networking is reasonable.

Compute? You can run stuff like Proxmox in commercial mode and get tons of features for really reasonable price.

Ram is now the big nasty, but I'm thinking with the 500 billion USD dropped on this circlejerk economy, ram will come back down.

You can also get a few graphics cards for AI stuff, but I'd constrain it to actual dedicated reasons, rather than some "AI everywhere".

Backups can be tricky. Run tape, but also run encrypted S3 backups remote, for 'holyshiteverythingsgone' reasons.

I used to be syseng for a small dev company. They had 3 racks by a local MSP, and was grossly mismanaged. Could have did everything in 1.5 racks. I have pictures, and you'd be aghast.

Re: Google Cloud suspended my account for 2 years, only automated replies

#53

Post by crazygringo »

tonymet wrote: post #45
hudo wrote: post #31

How come your business or research are so tied to GCP? What about other providers?

This is an asinine question. Even if you build agnostic solutions (like a docker image), you have storage resources, networks, configs, ACLs, snapshots and more all trapped inside GCP. we’re human — we forget to backup things, or push important commits . And we know cloud solutions quickly develop lock-in – even a simple cloud DB instance locks you into the vendors config . So there are at least a dozen perfectly goo…

It's not asinine. This suspension happened two years ago. I don't see any sudden panicking.

Re: Google Cloud suspended my account for 2 years, only automated replies

#54

Post by splix »

aetherspawn wrote: post #43

Plenty of GCP, AWS and Azure experiences in this thread, but any Cloudflare experiences?

I had a bad Cloudflare experience. So, my card on file got no balance one day (my bad, I forgot to update to a new card), and they just turned off the services.

They somehow managed to charge partial amount (like 80% of the bill), but decided to turn off everything anyway, even the services that could be covered by those 80%. They turned off what they offer for free, and we were unable to change the setting, like instead of their CDN point traffic to an S3 bucket, etc.

When they do that they basically freeze your account. I mean you cannot provide a new card to pay the outstanding bill, or do anything at all actually. You're not welcomed here anymore. Locked out. That's is a terrible way to react to a payment failure after being a paying customer for a few years.

It was hard to reach the support, and it took multiple days until I found someone on Reddit who looked at our ticket and it eventually helped.

PS I had much worse experience with GCP after being a loyal customer of them for like 15 years, so Clouflare is good.

Re: Google Cloud suspended my account for 2 years, only automated replies

#55

Post by _drg9 »

vrosas wrote: post #20
politelemon wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Working in small and medium businesses I've observed the same thing, and I've been quite satisfied with it. So I don't think it's really gone downhill, so GP's comment doesn't really resonate for me, but that isn't to negate their experience. Otoh I keep hearing horror stories about GCP and now I'm reluctant to try it.

Shitting on GCP is just popular on HN and always gets upvoted. AWS and Azure have royally fucked thousands of customers if you care to search for those writeups. My wild ass guess, considering posts like these have zero background details, is that they were careless with service account keys and their account got suspended for mining crypto or something. They also probably weren’t actually paying for support of any k…

Nope. We had been testing in our development and staging environments for months. We were deploying to production the exact same stack and we got our quota revoked within about an hour. We must have tripped some random thing. We have absolutely no idea what I could have been though.

Re: Google Cloud suspended my account for 2 years, only automated replies

#56

Post by tonymet »

crazygringo wrote: post #53
tonymet wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an asinine question. Even if you build agnostic solutions (like a docker image), you have storage resources, networks, configs, ACLs, snapshots and more all trapped inside GCP. we’re human — we forget to backup things, or push important commits . And we know cloud solutions quickly develop lock-in – even a simple cloud DB instance locks you into the vendors config . So there are at least a dozen perfectly goo…

It's not asinine. This suspension happened two years ago . I don't see any sudden panicking.

Appeals take time. And it’s not an uncommon case . It doesn’t make his desire to recover the resources any less valid .

Re: Google Cloud suspended my account for 2 years, only automated replies

#57

Post by vrosas »

_drg9 wrote: post #42
vrosas wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quota for what? In my experience the GCP service quotas are pretty sensible and if you’re running up against them you’re either dealing with unusual levels of traffic or (more often) you’re just using that service incorrectly.

The quota we needed increased far beyond the usual was the YouTube API. The startup was a media editing and publishing tool, with a feature to upload videos to YouTube on your behalf. Uploading a video requires a ton of quota, which they gave us. Regardless, dropping all quotas to 0 effectively killed our GCP account.

Interesting. I guess we’ve learned an important lesson in not building businesses around APIs that don’t have an SLA…

Re: Google Cloud suspended my account for 2 years, only automated replies

#58

Post by danpalmer »

_drg9 wrote: post #2

I had my GCP quota algorithmically set to 0 after spending 6 months working with them to launch a startup. I went through a ton of hoops to get approval for our quota. We sent them system diagrams, code samples, financial reports, growth predictions, etc. It was months of back and forth. I'll also add that it was very annoying because they auto-reject your quota request if you don't respond to their emails within 48…

What did your account manager say about this. Getting this interaction right is the core of their job, enabling your business on the platform so you spend more money. With this bad an interaction I'd have asked for a new account manager.

Re: Google Cloud suspended my account for 2 years, only automated replies

#59

Post by danpalmer »

bilbo-b-baggins wrote: post #4

Unless you know someone at Google with a little swagger to get things done you’re shit out of luck.

Our GCP account manager was always pretty good at solving these sorts of problems for us at my last company.

Re: Google Cloud suspended my account for 2 years, only automated replies

#60

Post by danpalmer »

aetherspawn wrote: post #43

Plenty of GCP, AWS and Azure experiences in this thread, but any Cloudflare experiences?

Yeah, we were looking for image CDN services (with resizing etc). Asked CloudFlare and they said $200 a month, everyone else was saying $3-5k per month.

Had a sales call with CloudFlare, they said yes they do flat rate billing and it's only $200 a month for all we can eat image hosting.

We of course called bullshit and third time around (talking to human sales reps) we said, just to get it in writing, we can do X bandwidth/Y images for $200 a month?

...oh errr, no, that would be more like $7k.

Thankfully we smelled bullshit and didn't take sales word for it. We'd have built an integration and started paying only to be bitten a month or two later when they readjusted our pricing. They basically refuse to talk about real pricing until you're already paying $200/m and locked in.

We ended up hosting our own on GKE for $500-$1k/m.

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