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Let me explain what recently happened while testing Azure RemoteApp. I was put in charge in comparing RemoteApp to our Citrix cluster, feature compatibility, a
by kefka 10y ago
Let me explain what recently happened while testing Azure RemoteApp.
I was put in charge in comparing RemoteApp to our Citrix cluster, feature compatibility, and cost. Now, I'm part of a university so that's "negotiated". We're also part of I2, so data ingress/egress should be free as per our site contract. (Yeah, it amounted to $5, but we were billed for it against our current enterprise agreement).
I worked with a MS Engineer to set everything up. I set cost limits to kill service if we go over $200 (past the free trial).... Well guess what? They only give emails, not kill service. Your account will still accrue no matter what. The engineer said that it could kill service. So, I had limits set to 'alert me'.
Until 2 months ago. They switched what was the Beta Portal to the main portal. Doing this eliminated even my alerts I had. The account accrued around $2800, with NO emails, No alerts, and NO questionable billing calls regarding 'non-normal computing practices'.
I'm finishing up a paper and a post-mortem regarding this incident. Obviously my university can absorb this, but the points stand:
1. There is no adequate way of controlling your bill
2. Billing calculations are done with many hours of lag-time. You don't know the zinger you just got until later.
3. There is NO fraud policy... Unless you count "Too Fucking Bad" as the policy.
- sillysaurus3 10y agoDid you try contacting them and asking for a refund? What did they say?
- kefka 10y agoOh yeah. I did that. 1 time through our executive agreement. That one was unresolved and marked as resolved. I then called again, promised that it would be taken care of. It was ignored after the 3rd email. I called again, and was given someone so daft that, even when requesting a manager, he refused. That incident went nowhere. I'm now on the 4th ticket. I might be getting somewhere... But again, they refuse to return calls and emails.
- jsingleton 10y agoThe new portal is still lacking compared to the old one and they should have waited longer before pushing it IMO. I still find I need to go back to the old one for many things. Azure ML still uses the old portal. If you need to try stuff in the future you could use BizSpark. The best way of not getting charged is not to provide payment information.
- kefka 10y agoI wish I could, but the simple terms and conditions are on the front page. Your startup qualifies if it is less than: 5 years old ~ almost 200 years old is privately held ~ public institution and earns less than $1M annually. ~ Billions of dollars, no clue.
- johngossman 10y agoSend me mail (see my about) and I'll see if I can help
- thomasz 10y agoI had a remotely similar experience a few years back, although they were very helpful and canceled the invoice.
- jsudhams 10y agoSingle reason for not using cloud for personal project neither amazon nor microsoft support cost bassed monitoring and killing service. Dont why they do this though.