[nonrandomstring]

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 the arbitrary whim of opaque, unassailable power centres that masquerade as "Free services".

[fnordpiglet]

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 obsession, and it generally resulted in making things better for the customers even at Amazon’s expense (I.e., prolonged non payment not resulting in suspension and rebates and credits back for bill shock, etc). Again I’m sure folks can find counter stories - it’s an ultra mega corp for sure. But the culture was definitely oriented on our customers favor.

[EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK]

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.

[thenickdude]

Hetzner banned my account on day 2, lol. At least they didn't charge me for my server (that billing would have happened at the end of the month).

A friend of mine had the same experience with them.

[EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK]

They are really sensitive to two things: address confirmation, in case you want to avoid 19% VAT, and mining for SIA)

[thenickdude]

They weren't even happy with my verification using a live selfie with my passport (i.e. by live video camera stream). I think they didn't like that I ran my dedicated server for about 6 hours and then shut it down.

I was testing software for the upcoming macOS Ventura release, and I only needed 6 hours of initial usage, and then 6 further hours a few weeks later (when a new developer beta dropped) but they closed down my account on the second day.

AWS had no trouble taking my money, so with some finagling I was able to use them instead: https://github.com/thenickdude/proxmox-on-ec2

[jeremyjh]

Microsoft and Amazon both have this amazing feature called “customer service”, and I’ve used them many times. It’s not sexy but it works.

[akaike]

Have the same experience with AWS, the customer service is nice and I always felt like I’m talking to a human and not a bot like with Google. Google is just the worst nightmare for developers

[dekhn]

dvery time the Google Cloud sales people contact me to try to increase my enterprise's use of GCP, I tell them this over and over. I don't want to give my money to Google if AWS does a much better job of customer support. And we're serious: we use all 3 clouds, we have TAMs in each of them, and a direct line to senior leadership.

I used to work for Google and then left for a startup; the sales people kept calling and saying "Urs wants to talk to the CEO" and I'd say: "the CEO hired me to negotiate our cloud deal. We considered GCP but AWS made a far better offer. Urs can call me and we can discuss the limitations of GCP". (I know Urs; I'm the one on stage with him when GCE was launched, running the demo). He never did call and we never gave them our business.

(BTW, my first question for Urs was going to be "why did you defend killing Google Reader? That strongly affected my interest in buying Google products." :)

[sitkack]

Urs should only be making technical decisions for the sake of the technology. When it comes to business, he comes off like a cartoon supervillain business man. He really doesn't listen to how his words (or tweets) land.

The TSE should have been able to override the accruing charges on their GCP account. Or they can use another payment method to pay the GCP bill. It sounds like funds they are owed, that they would use to pay GCP bill are locked away until the account is verified.

[tracerbulletx]

I don't have the statistics to back up any statement about the odds that one provider or another is safer, but AWS has had a person I could talk to and they really resolved my issues and seemed empowered to do so. That's a big and real difference.

[kkielhofner]

Anecdotal but I listed a few graphics cards on Amazon with the same account I had AWS on and they booted me without any recourse or contact information.

Very strange.

[tracerbulletx]

There really needs to be some more legal precedent around this stuff. In the commercial real estate leasing industry there are legal commitments and a framework of legal understanding to protect business owners or at least provide predictability. That needs to be applied to leasing computing resources given how much business flows through the internet now.

[cavisne]

The frameworks largely exist, the above situation is like if you rented an office building and then started running an unlicensed side business out of it. It’s just a lot rarer (cloud computing has a much lower cost of entry then a commercial lease).

[nonrandomstring]

I agree. But I can't imagine what that would look like. Arbitrary discontinuation of service is a tangible harm. But how could one possibly compel a provider to do otherwise?

You'd have to do something like construe the provision of service as an implied contract to continuity in the same way that T&Cs assert that usage of a system implies acceptance of some rules.

[warbeforepeace]

The big thing is not to use your cloud account for random other shit. Don't want it to get suspended for something else.

[fnordpiglet]

Customer Obsession Leaders start with the customer and work backwards. They work vigorously to earn and keep customer trust. Although leaders pay attention to competitors, they obsess over customers.

[arvindamirtaa]

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.

[1123581321]

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.

[htrp]

You can tell which part of the company makes money?

[1123581321]

Yes, but cloud has such a good chance of becoming a profit center. They should be developing it and staffing it accordingly now. Amazon was able to think ahead in this way. Amazon also has significant cultural weaknesses, but their drive to improve the user experience forced them to stumble into principles of good customer support. Google has this drive to test and improve the interface only.

[dahdum]

> AWS or Microsoft would be no better, sadly I think you are rationalising loss

In my experience AWS has much better support. Google is famously indifferent to user support issues.

[thiht]

> Google is famously indifferent to user support issues

Of course they are. They have the BEST engineers on the planet! How could they ever be wrong? The produ... the customer is obviously wrong in a way they're too dumb to understand.