[dachryn]

a 400 month customer is really a tiny fish, don't expect special treatment without support packages. Do you even have an enterprise contract with them? The bronze contract can be had from 0 spend, and gives the option to pay through invoicing and have support. Or are you just going through credit card which is intended for hobby use?

I am not defending them, but this is totally on you. What was the missing information? Lack of identity verification or credit card verification? Again that's on you. You should have also received a warning in the cloud console and if you hvae the cloud app on your phone, there as well.

[guhidalg]

> I am not defending them, but this is totally on you.

You are defending them. Unless OP is disingenuous, the reputational loss of an unhappy customer is hard to shake. Customers will make mistakes, if the cloud provider doesn't have automated systems to catch and prevent those mistakes then they aren't doing well in customer service.

A similar thing happened to me with my personal Azure spend, but I felt they handled it much better simply by communicating early and often when there was a problem processing payment. I had time to respond and fix my subscription, so I stayed a happy customer.

[mkup]

Fortunately traditional hosting providers like Hetzner won't suspend me even if I pay $10/month on average. That's why I avoid Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure and AWS like a plague. I prefer to have a freedom to switch my hosting provider at any time, even if that sometimes means more infrastructure work. That kind of attitude to customers, as GCP usually has, is just not for me, thanks.

[rwalle]

"switch my hosting provider at any time"

Sorry, obviously you are not the kind of customer that the three big players care about.

Also, I hope you could show real data points for the comment regarding Hetzner instead of just putting a very questionable claim here.

[mkup]

I don't understand you. I have said that Hetzner is not going to suspend my account (or deprive me of customer support) on the grounds of paying too little per month. What kind of data point you need? I am the data point. I'm their customer since 2015.

The general point I was trying to make is not an advertisement of particular hosting provider, but the fact that traditional hosting providers are totally fungible. If tomorrow this company goes bonkers and starts doing stupid things, then I just migrate to OVH, DigitalOcean, Vultr or any other competitor on this market. But unlike traditional hosting providers, there is no market among big cloud providers, as they are not fungible on the customer API level, so each of them is actually a monopoly. And monopoly is generally no good for customers. The rest can be deduced from this principle.

[tracker1]

I wouldn't say that... there are a LOT of sites that operate at under $1k/month spend. If you lose 10k customers for one big fish, is it worth it? I know it's not apples to apples, but still can really matter. And just maybe it's not worth supporting a bigger player in that case altogether.

And for the bigger fish, if it's me, I'm one to push for complete containerization and orchestration beyond simple DBAS service for PostgreSQL, depending on needs for scale. Which absolutely means switching can be easy enough.

The only advantage the big cloud providers have is the services for the lower-middle tier customers.

[rcarr]

I've just coded my latest site using aws but I'm going to be teaching myself terraform in the coming week so I can rewrite the infrastructure as code so I can move providers easily if I ever have any problems in the future.

[rirze]

Terraform is not going to make you cloud-agnostic. If you switch cloud providers, you'll still use Terraform but you will have to rewrite much, if not all, of your TF code.

[rcarr]

Yeah, it is disappointing that something like this isn't the standard but I can code it myself if I really want to:

https://awstip.com/how-to-make-terraform-truly-cloud-agnosti...

And even if I don't, I imagine rewriting a terraform workflow is probably easier than taking cloudformation code and then rewriting it into whatever the equivalent is in google or microsoft land. Atm I'm pretty happy with aws and don't see myself moving but I like to have the option if needed.

[awestroke]

If you can be banned from the platform at any time just for having the audacity of using your credit card, maybe they should have a big yellow warning box when signing up with a credit card