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Google Map 10X their price on a single price change. Never trust Google Cloud or run any production servers with them. They have zero empathy for you. Just to

Google Map 10X their price on a single price change. Never trust Google Cloud or run any production servers with them. They have zero empathy for you. Just today, we got screwed by Google Cloud (as a 4 yrs customer) when they abruptly shutdown our production servers just because we didn't fill up a form on-time. My story: https://twitter.com/Ryan_Liao/status/1634103410525077504 https://twitter.com/Ryan_Liao/status/1634103410525077504 (happens today) [Link Updated]

KingOfCoders 4y ago
Yes we we're caught by this some years ago and switched to Stadia Maps (very happy).
kunley 4y ago
The story looks like deleted..
- pirsquare 4y ago
  Thanks! Link updated to my own tweet. I don't know why my post got removed. It's no diff from previous gcloud horror stories.
dachryn 4y ago
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.
- awestroke 4y ago
  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
- mkup 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    "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 4y ago
      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 4y ago
      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.
- guhidalg 4y ago
  > 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.
brian-bk 4y ago
Google's data suite (bigquery, ai) is unmatched imo but I agree -- prod realtime apps shouldn't run on gcp. Google has proved time and time again that they have awful support. I've seen plenty of gcp incidents and every support thread is them gaslighting that the customer is wrong, gcp had no issues. One time we had our dependencies on Google breaking and google suite reported the outage but gcp didn't, gcp support still tried to deny that gcp had any issues. It's funny that AWS support isn't super great absolutely, but relatively boy their support is amazing. They will at least acknowledge there was an issue on their end.
- pirsquare 4y ago
  "prod realtime apps shouldn't run on gcp." YES! Everyone should read this. Google Cloud will shutdown your servers for the slightest stupid reason. NEVER EVER run any production apps with Google Cloud. - "gaslighting that the customer is wrong, gcp had no issues" YES this is my experience except in my case they didn't gaslight me and instead avoid giving a resolution. - I run a business that hundreds of paying customers (ecom stores) relies on and I'm a 4 yrs customer with Google Cloud. They shutdown all my servers last Friday for the slightest stupid reason and don't give a fuck to rectify things fast. 3 days now and they still haven't gave me a resolution. On paper, my servers were shutdown for at least more than 72 hrs and it's still ongoing. Context: https://www.onvoard.com/blog/our-production-servers-was-suspended-by-google-cloud https://www.onvoard.com/blog/our-production-servers-was-susp...

KingOfCoders 4y ago

Yes we we're caught by this some years ago and switched to Stadia Maps (very happy).

kunley 4y ago

The story looks like deleted..

pirsquare 4y ago
Thanks! Link updated to my own tweet. I don't know why my post got removed. It's no diff from previous gcloud horror stories.

dachryn 4y ago

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.

awestroke 4y ago
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
mkup 4y ago
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 4y ago
  "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 4y ago
    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 4y ago
    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.
guhidalg 4y ago
> 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.

brian-bk 4y ago

Google's data suite (bigquery, ai) is unmatched imo but I agree -- prod realtime apps shouldn't run on gcp. Google has proved time and time again that they have awful support. I've seen plenty of gcp incidents and every support thread is them gaslighting that the customer is wrong, gcp had no issues. One time we had our dependencies on Google breaking and google suite reported the outage but gcp didn't, gcp support still tried to deny that gcp had any issues. It's funny that AWS support isn't super great absolutely, but relatively boy their support is amazing. They will at least acknowledge there was an issue on their end.

pirsquare 4y ago
"prod realtime apps shouldn't run on gcp." YES! Everyone should read this. Google Cloud will shutdown your servers for the slightest stupid reason. NEVER EVER run any production apps with Google Cloud. - "gaslighting that the customer is wrong, gcp had no issues" YES this is my experience except in my case they didn't gaslight me and instead avoid giving a resolution. - I run a business that hundreds of paying customers (ecom stores) relies on and I'm a 4 yrs customer with Google Cloud. They shutdown all my servers last Friday for the slightest stupid reason and don't give a fuck to rectify things fast. 3 days now and they still haven't gave me a resolution. On paper, my servers were shutdown for at least more than 72 hrs and it's still ongoing. Context: https://www.onvoard.com/blog/our-production-servers-was-suspended-by-google-cloud https://www.onvoard.com/blog/our-production-servers-was-susp...