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AWS Restored My Account: The Human Who Made the Difference

seuros.com

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Re: AWS Restored My Account: The Human Who Made the Difference

#61

Post by fab23 »

He has given his AWS account out of hands.

I have read both his article in full. As I see it the issue is that he has given his account out of his own hands. But I guess he did not understand the consequences of this.

He put his own AWS account as a member into another companies "AWS Organizations" (https://docs.aws.amazon.com/organizations/), so they could pay his bills. As I understand if the so called Management Account gets deleted (reason may not matter), this will also delete all the member accounts, probably as they don't have any payment setup active any more. A good overview gives "Terminology and concepts for AWS Organizations"(https://docs.aws.amazon.com/organizations/latest/userguide/o...).

I had done this setup in the company I worked for. We "merged" two independent accounts (one from the company we acquired) as members into an AWS Organization with consolidated billing below a newly created management account. We let our AWS account manager take care of transferring the payment settings (we already payed with invoice and bank transfer) from our own (now only a member) account into the (newly) management account. With this we had only one invoice per month and everything is legally owned by the owner company. With this also some discounts or savings plans can be used from all accounts. Over the years we also created several new member accounts out of the management account, which is easy and does not need the setup of any payment information at all.

Re: AWS Restored My Account: The Human Who Made the Difference

#62

Post by retox »

I am banned from all Amazon sites and services for turning on 2FA.

I was getting constant fake SMS messages about a failed login attempt, turned on 2FA thinking it was a good idea, 2 minutes later banned completely for 'abuse'. My case will not be heard or reviewed.

Re: AWS Restored My Account: The Human Who Made the Difference

#63

Post by [deleted] »

IlikeKitties wrote: post #27
pjc50 wrote: post #8

Social media is the true support channel of last resort, especially in a community like HN where your message might just find its way to an insider with enough seniority to go off script and fix things. Re: "The Support Agents Who Became LLMs"; yes, institutionalized support is terrible almost everywhere. Partly because it costs real money to pay real humans to do it properly, so it ends up as a squeezed cost centre.

Is it just me or have others here also just plainly given up using support channels of almost any company? I feel like in most cases they are neither able or willing to help you and they rarely are able to do more than yourself using the webuis.

[deleted]

Re: AWS Restored My Account: The Human Who Made the Difference

#64

Post by cnst »

seuros wrote: post #50

Author here: Let’s be clear on backups: Yes, I had backups everywhere. Across providers, in different countries. But I built a system tied to my AWS account number, my instances, my IDs, my workflows. When that account went down, all those “other” backups were just dead noise encrypted forever. Bringing them up to the story only invites the 'just use your other backups' fallback, and ignores the real fragility of cen…

> AWS is the apex cloud provider on the planet. This isnt about redundancy or best practices.

Sorry, but it is absolutely and undeniably not!

I don't think it's accurate to portray AWS as the underlying infrastructure of the internet on the planet at all.

Speaking of the "planet", here's a sample statistics for .ru ccTLD on web hosting usage across the 1 million domain names in the zone — one of the top-10 ccTLD zones on the planet:

https://statonline.ru/metrics/hosting_shared?month=2021-12&t...

https://archive.ph/7aYVD

Amazon is dead last #30 with 0.46% of the market; the data is for December 2021, so, it's before any payment issues that would only originate in March 2022, and which would take weeks/months/years to propagate.

Hetzner is far more popular, at 4.11%, also, OVH is bigger than Amazon, too, at 1.38%, and even Wix had 2.16%. Even Google managed to get 1.15%, probably because of their Google Sites service. Most of the rest of the providers are local — that's how it should be if digital sovereignty is of the essence. The real reason for the local providers, however, is most likely affordability, reliability, price, better service and far better support, and not the digital sovereignty considerations at all. This is exactly why Hetzner is at the top, because the market is obviously price-sensitive if the unlimited venture capital was never available for the local startups, and Hetzner and OVH provide the best value for money, whereas AWS, does not.

The earliest data this service currently has, is for March 2020, and there, Amazon didn't even make it in the top-30 at all!

https://statonline.ru/metrics/hosting_shared?month=2020-03&t...

https://archive.ph/ciD1X

They have a separate tab for VPS and Dedicated, which covers about 0.1 million domain names compared to 1 million in the prior view, and, there, Hetzner, Digital Ocean and OVH, are, likewise, ahead of Amazon, too, with Hetzner being #2, having over 10%, compared to Amazon's 2%, with Amazon thus far behind:

https://statonline.ru/metrics/hosting_vps_dedic?tld=ru&month...

https://archive.ph/9SPs7

Numbers for 2025 don't look as good for any foreign provider, likely due to a combination of factors, including much stronger data sovereignty laws that may preclude most startups from being able to use foreign services like Hetzner, but Hetzner is still the most popular foreign option in both categories, still having more market share in 2025 than AWS did in 2021, and even DigitalOcean is still more popular than AWS, too.

BTW, I've tried looking up the BBC Radio 4 apocalypse claims, and I'm glad to find out that this information is false.

I'm glad you got your account restored, and I thank you for bringing the much needed attention to these verification issues, but I don't think you're making the correct conclusions here. Not your keys, not your coins. Evidently, this applies to backups, too.

Re: AWS Restored My Account: The Human Who Made the Difference

#66

Post by vbezhenar »

deadbabe wrote: post #65

Digging deeper, it seems like the user just did it themselves. Didn’t properly verify their account. That’s the end. What do you expect?

For a customer, who paid 10 years, I'd expect a long enough grace period to allow customer to verify the account, while data would stay intact.

Re: AWS Restored My Account: The Human Who Made the Difference

#68

Post by belter »

Most of the fault starts with AWS support, but Seuros did almost nothing correct unlike what the blog says. Frankly it's surprising to see yet another blog insisting on NOT learning lessons while being called "lessons learned". How hard do you have to try?

Get some training. It's in the first few slides... Read the docs. Look at the Well-Architected Framework...

See this comment for what he should have done: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44828910

Re: AWS Restored My Account: The Human Who Made the Difference

#70

Post by Drunkfoowl »

vbezhenar wrote: post #66
deadbabe wrote: post #65

Digging deeper, it seems like the user just did it themselves. Didn’t properly verify their account. That’s the end. What do you expect?

For a customer, who paid 10 years, I'd expect a long enough grace period to allow customer to verify the account, while data would stay intact.

During early AWS days, customers who didnt want to sign up with a CC (usually because a corp policy) would quit registration at the CC confirm, and then contact AWS CS directly for bypass effectively not completing registration and still having an account.

Just knowledge, do what you will.

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