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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

#71

Post by ishandotpage »

splix wrote: post #54
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 ins…

I am going through a very similar issue with Cloudflare right now, and billing support is almost of no help.

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

#73

Post by dpkirchner »

bilekas wrote: post #40
3eb7988a1663 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well that is kind of a problem of their own making. The clouds refuse to entertain the prospect of pre-paying for services/having some sort of hard spending limits because they know that over-allocation is probably driving a decent amount of revenue.

I dont really understand ops problem as I've been able to set monthly limits on expenditure. Seems trivial to setup.

Are you sure you're not thinking of billing alerts? AFAIK there is still no way to set spending limits at GCP.

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

#74

Post by riedel »

m0llusk wrote: post #25

UC Berkeley gets much of its IT infrastructure from Google in a big and expensive contract. Perhaps some of the campus staff could try to negotiate on your behalf?

I was wondering exactly how that it related. We as a German university are actually still shaping our cloud strategy and such stories are kind of worst case scenario to protect our research. However, I would imagine that stuff bought via our official contracts (actual there is even a European wide framework contract for all unis) protects a bit. Still we are in an even more complex situation because individual researchers could be hit by US sanctions, so it difficult to also understand the reverse risk. I think StackIT (Schwartz/LIDL) will run Google PaaS/SaaS for further protections. In the end, however, building your business (in OP's/our case is research) on cloud seens to remain a gamble without a concrete exit strategy.

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

#75

Post by Garlef »

benSaiyen wrote: post #46
entangledqubit wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has AWS support gone downhill in the last two years? I've worked with them in the past - as both an individual and a couple startups - I always reached a human. Issues weren't always resolved as quickly as I'd like but response times were short.

It has! In the 2010s I always got an AWS support team to help. Now I get handed off to an external partner of AWS certified contractors. They are often terrible. They have no backend systems access and just run through the AWS equivalent of "reboot it", "defrag your disk". Basically trying to find an issue in my pipeline. Which they never do because it's the same TF scripts used for years. Only once we waste time goi…

My last experience was with someone giving me answers that where clearly in part LLM generated: It contained payloads/configs that did not even match the actual API

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

#77

Post by ratg13 »

_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…

As a petty person I would at least attempt to push this through small claims court.

Add up the amount you lost moving to another platform, value your time appropriately, and submit your claim.

A judge will decide if it’s fair, and you can be awarded ~10k in most places.

If they don’t pay for some reason you can put a lien on their property.

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

#78

Post by actualwitch »

tonymet wrote: post #51
_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.

Was the startup actually women owned and helping underprivileged kids?

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

#79

Post by MichaelZuo »

_drg9 wrote: post #61
vrosas wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That was just a feature of the product to be helpful. Not a core function at all.

If you werent willing to pay for an SLA, and they clearly werent going to offer one to you… why is it surprising if literally no promises were made in writing?

Why would they intentionally lose money on your private commercial activity without even that?

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

#80

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.

@dang why was my response autokilled?
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