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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

#91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> We would rather reverse your $20k bill and keep you alive And as a customer, I never want to be in a position where I ever see $megabill. Maybe I might be able to get reversed if the gods smile upon me that day, but it would be incredibly stressful until I had resolutions. Seems an obvious blindside for “customer obsessed”. Anything I might host is practically a joke for which I would gladly have the provider pull…

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

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

#92
In the beginning of the year, I was recommended by a friend working at Google to test GCP using the tutorials on https://www.cloudskillsboost.google/

Google banned my account while I was doing one tutorial. One step failed, the provisioning of something, and I had to redo a few things again. It succeeded but I had used more egress bandwidth than allowed to run the tutorial correctly so they banned me automatically a few minutes later.

The support unbanned me after some time but I thought it was a sign to not use GCP yet.

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

#93
I too am currently in Google Pay support hell. Never in my life have I experienced such a Byzantine hell of weaponized incompetence.

I’d post the thread but it’s just 48 exchanges of me calmly and patiently explaining the situation. And them failing to read the case notes, saying platitudes and then pasting the same non-useful canned response.

Here’s a fun fact or two: Did you know there’s no way to get your money out from the web interface? Did you know there’s no way to select your profile id on iOS? These two features haven’t been implemented. If you’re clever you can reconstruct the rest. Their documentation indicates that they also don’t have an account closure reconciliation process. I’m hoping that’s just inaccurate documentation because that’d be illegal.

Good times. Some states attorney generals should band together and sue those jerks.

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

#94

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 time was 3-5 days. I eventually just stopped filing support cases because they were useless.

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

#95
post #64

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 know it’s just anecdotal, but once you have some spend (around 1k a month I’m guessing), you get an account executive who I’ve been able to reach on the phone whenever I’ve needed. In fact they tried talking to me on the phone more than I wanted.

Google engineers are not known for being super available though.

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

#96

This is really sad. I feel bad for you and hope you manage to rebuild your base somewhere else safe - hopefully with technology that you control. You won't be the last person to get screwed over by the callous machinery of dehumanised big-tech (AWS or Microsoft would be no better, sadly I think you are rationalising loss). We must all wake up to just how horribly precarious the lives of ordinary people are against th…

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?

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

#97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We would rather reverse your $20k bill and keep you alive And as a customer, I never want to be in a position where I ever see $megabill. Maybe I might be able to get reversed if the gods smile upon me that day, but it would be incredibly stressful until I had resolutions. Seems an obvious blindside for “customer obsessed”. Anything I might host is practically a joke for which I would gladly have the provider pull…

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.

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

#98

This is really sad. I feel bad for you and hope you manage to rebuild your base somewhere else safe - hopefully with technology that you control. You won't be the last person to get screwed over by the callous machinery of dehumanised big-tech (AWS or Microsoft would be no better, sadly I think you are rationalising loss). We must all wake up to just how horribly precarious the lives of ordinary people are against th…

10 years across all 3 major cloud providers (and some others like Rackspace, etc), I can tell, Google support has been the absolute worst of all. I don't say that lightly. I take pride in how I can deal with customer service the most peacefully in my org. But that's all out of the window when their CS is nonexistent.

I can't remember the number of times they've shut down someone's production workload without notice or warning, gave them no way to resolve/rectify any supposed infraction, and gave no way to contact them to appeal the decision.

I once had to resort to numbering my points and just referring the boilerplate responses (few and far inbetween as they were) back to the numbers over and over until I finally gave up, moved away and never looked back.

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

#99

This is really sad. I feel bad for you and hope you manage to rebuild your base somewhere else safe - hopefully with technology that you control. You won't be the last person to get screwed over by the callous machinery of dehumanised big-tech (AWS or Microsoft would be no better, sadly I think you are rationalising loss). We must all wake up to just how horribly precarious the lives of ordinary people are against th…

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.

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

#100
I see many blame OP for relying on one single cloud provider without having backup and exit strategy. What if she/he is a single persone doing everything and having just barely the time to run the business? It's the same mentality I have seen from people complaining about Phoronix quality, ignoring It's a one man show website.
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