[slashink]

Pricing is fine. Tech support is a joke. I wish I could pay more for Google to actually offer good support. We tried GCE for a while but it just didn't cut it in terms of mean response time to questions. AWS really leads on support.

[boulos]

We do have paid support tiers (https://cloud.google.com/support/) with explicit time-to-response targets. Which were you using?

Disclaimer: I work on GCE.

[slashink]

Well tbh we got answers but they usually were; nope not offered, cannot be fixed. 3 weeks later I met a Google engineer working with GCE at a party who fixed it for us the day after hearing about our issue, which means it probably was able to be fixed from the first time.

[nulltype]

I will admit that the party support plan is a bit pricey.

[boulos]

Sounds like we should throw more parties ;).

[miles932]

I think this is a top priority customer ask; I'm running it up to our new brass.

[eco]

I haven't used GCE but I've had one of the worst support experiences ever with Google Cloud Billing Support while using Google App Engine.

I had a very simple question about billing (why was my bill higher than it seemed like it should be). Each reply would take a week and they'd often consist of copy and paste messages asking me to enter information I had already supplied or requests that I take screenshots of my console (all information they should readily have available). Then right at the end they swapped out who I was talking to for someone else and asked me to look up more information they already had and just ignored my question in the last email which would mean another week before I got an answer.

I had, luckily, experimented with the configuration and figured out what was wrong. The default instance class in reality is one higher (F2) than the documentation says it is ("If you do not specify a class, F1 is assigned by default."). Nowhere on the Console does it list what instance class is being used (which would have made the problem obvious) so there was really no way of knowing this without just guessing what the problem was. They never did answer my question "What is the default instance class?" (instead just abruptly ended the support ticket after proposed my theory about what was wrong).

Then I started getting emails about a billing account being past due. It was an old billing account from before I moved to High Replication (I have no idea how I ended up with two billing accounts...it was during the dark time when the console was even worse than it is now). That billing account was assigned to no projects and had no oustanding balance. I jumped in and just deleted the unused billing account. Then a few days later they sent a scary email saying that the billing account had been terminated (even though I had deleted it) which made my scramble to make sure they didn't close my in-use billing account out of nowhere (they hadn't thankfully).

None of this has left me with any confidence in Google's Cloud offerings.

I plan to migrate off GAE as soon as I can rewrite the app (luckily it's not very big).

[snewman]

Can you say more about your experience with AWS support? My experience has been consistently quite bad. I've had to resort to AWS technical support perhaps a dozen times over the last few years. They're always slow to respond (even if you have an SLA promising otherwise), and it always takes half a dozen go-rounds to get to a resolution. They will stick with you until the issue is resolved, but they don't add much value along the way. It's a slow process of "did you do obvious thing X" (even if you've already provided facts indicating that couldn't be the problem), "please provide six different pieces of information" (that don't seem to bear on the actual question), and "I've never seen this before, let me go research it".

[nulltype]

For the lowest support plan (Silver), high priority issues were addressed pretty quickly. Low priority ones are a bit slow, but hey, they're low priority. Plus the Silver support plan is very cheap.