[throwaway892238]

Google locked our company out of using our own domain on Google Workspaces because a former employee had signed up for a Workspace account using our domain, and we had no way to recover it. We literally manage our domain in GCP but they wouldn't accept that we own our own domain and thus won't let us use our domain with Workspaces, which screws you out of a lot of Google functionality. Never seen a company that was too incompetent to allow users to use its own product and make zero attempt to solve the customer's problem.

Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said "We need scale to be profitable." No, you need to stop treating your customers like crap to be profitable. We don't trust you, you are a pain in our asses, and we have alternatives, so there is really no need for us to spend our money on you. It's now a matter of when we all move to AWS and Azure, not if.

[mgcunha]

Sorry to hear that happened to you. They do lock out domains that were previously registered and still active from being re-registered [that's happened to me too]. Their Support should have offered you to contest and take over. It's not immediate [takes several days to go through the process and the departed employee will delay things] but if you can demonstrate positive DNS record control and go through the motions with support it does get done and you gain control. If they didn't offer it to you over support, try asking for it [if you are still wanting to go ahead with it]. It's not great speed but it also serves to protect you should someone else at the company decides to impersonate you and recreate the domain.

Best of luck!

[throwaway892238]

> if you can demonstrate positive DNS record control and go through the motions with support it does get done and you gain control.

nope. made the DNS change. went through the motions. even got at call - at 5AM Eastern Time - from a support person to ask me one question, then "I need to confer with so and so". several emails later, new support people asking the same questions. but because I cannot answer "recovery questions" made by person who has left the company, they refuse to offer any other support. attestations of proof of who we are be damned, they just follow their robotic script. so we're just screwed.

[zinekeller]

> attestations of proof of who we are be damned, they just follow their robotic script. so we're just screwed.

Hire a lawyer and send a certified letter with return receipt requiring them to explain their decision, and prepare to sue. I'm presuming that this is a B2B dispute, and I notice that a lot of HN people are (rather counterintuitively, considering Y Combinator owns HN) scared of hiring lawyers. Unless that the records show that your old employee is the recorded administrative owner of the domains (this unfortunately happens frequently to small businesses), this should resolve this issue.

[userbinator]

It's now a matter of when we all move to AWS and Azure, not if.

If you really think that the "grass is greener on the other side"...

No, the real solution is to stay away from Big Tech and cloud in general.

[seanhunter]

That’s completely contrary to my experience. Running a small startup we encountered all 3. For us, MS/Azure were the most eager to please but in many ways the worst from an execution standpoint. GCP were very good from an execution standpoint but absolutely zero support and stories like this one scared us off. Lots of big GCP corporate clients actually use them through consultancies which essentially provide the support and are large enough on aggregate to get listened to by Google. AWS were good at actually doing things and also offered support the couple of times we needed it.

[mikymoothrowa]

This has been my experience too: Google Apps/GCP might have marginally or even substantially better products than Azure/365 but Microsoft almost never kills products and force you to migrate to their newer offering and they have excellent support folks

[leokennis]

Microsoft has learned through the decades where you can make big bucks: charge enterprises through the roof for “basic” stuff, and in return promise them to _not_break_their_shit_ and help them (for even more money) if they screw up themselves.

Now with Azure, basically they’re making that available to smaller scale players as well.

Meanwhile Google operate GCP in fundamentally the same way they operate free Gmail accounts: hey, this stuff is super neat! So neat actually you bunch of freeloaders are not allowed to complain if this free and neat thing spectacularly breaks once in a while! Wait…you pay for this stuff? Naaah!

[jiggawatts]

I’ve never heard of anyone getting locked out of their Azure account like what seems a regular occurrence with GCP.

They have human support and have proper Enterprise Agreements that don’t turn off your business because some heuristic tripped.

[bozhark]

This is by Google’s design.

You have to get enough traction on social media to get on someone important at the company’s feed

[thirdusername]

I had an incident a couple of years back where AWS couldn’t swap a cancelled CC on AWS after we had for an unknown exception, and we kept getting overdue invoice alerts. and it was during December holiday season. AWS singapore has to escalate to US since it was a billing issue.

A false negative security alert from 6 months earlier was the cause, which had blocked CC changes. It took months to resolve but it was manageable.

I know from first hand from a different experience that you can be months overdue with tens of thousands of missing payments on AWS, and tens of thousands in recurring costs without them closing your account. You can effectively run a quarter of credit line from your hosting costs without any issue if you need that.

Your account manager doesn’t even start raising it personally for the first 3 months, they are very easy to deal with.

[bruce511]

You are experiencing a false equivalence here. You are attributing outcomes (as being the same) as being the result of some common factor, when the cause is a very different factor.

Google is big. As are Microsoft and Amazon. Google has bad customer service, therefore so do Microsoft and Amazon.

You tried to x in the cloud. You had a bad experience. Therefore the cloud is bad.

In reality of course big companies are not the same. Bigness does not imply sameness. Google support is well known to be rubbish. Microsoft and Amazon support are well known to be excellent. If support matters to you (like when things go wrong) then take that into consideration.

Same for the cloud. There are advantages and disadvantages sure, but providers are different. Google likes to kill services. Others don't. Startups vanish as often as they appear.

Tech is not the only place where you see this false equivalence. All politicians are the same. All fast-food is equally crap. All cars have the same gas mileage. Turns out, no, they are very different, but you need to dig deeper to understand their differences.