3 ms·

It's a shame the industry can't agree on a basic SLA: - Solicit a hard limit when you open an account. People can only afford so much, don't bankrupt them. -

It's a shame the industry can't agree on a basic SLA: - Solicit a hard limit when you open an account. People can only afford so much, don't bankrupt them. - As soon as we see your account heading for a 10,000% increase on last month, we'll send a SMS, GIVE YOU A PHONE CALL, even send a letter and confirm everything is okay. - If you're about to trigger a suspension, we'll send you an automated SMS, and if you're a paying customer, we'll do you a solid and spend $5 calling you to make sure you understand what's about to happen to your business. - You get one 7-day extension. People get sick, go on holiday, have life in their way and often haven't figured out how to juggle business critical credentials amongst people. Just imagine the quality of life improvements if people felt safe using a cloud provider. Instead we see stories like this and withdraw back to colocation and flat-rate VPSes.

apple4ever 4y ago
That's the human and courtesy way of doing it. Not sure why it's so hard.
sharemywin 4y ago
That's the thing right at some point you should have an account manager. if your spending maybe 4 but definitely 5 figures you should have an account manager. I would argue same on the publisher side.
coldpie 4y ago
That all sounds like it costs money. This is a capitalist society: companies operating correctly should provide as little service as possible for as much money as possible. Nothing you suggest aligns with that goal: -A hard limit? Why limit your income to $600 when your customers can accidentally rack up a $6000 bill? You can even be magnanimous and negotiate it down to a $2000 bill and everyone's happy. -Why would we pay money in monitoring software, SMS & phone call fees to stop a 10,000% revenue increase? -$5 to try to tell a customer not to give us more money? Are you crazy? -People getting sick under capitalism are drags on the economy and should be derided and made as miserable as possible so it doesn't happen again. > Just imagine the quality of life improvements if people felt safe using a cloud provider. We're not here to make people feel safe. We're here to make incredibly rich people even richer. Get on board, man. You'll never operate a successful company with your approach, everyone else will beat you on price.
- asplake 4y ago
  Just give us the option to pay. Some might call it an insurance premium. (And yes my satire detector is triggered, though one can never be sure)
  - midoridensha 4y ago
    The problem is that, very likely, there are decision-makers at these companies that have exactly this reasoning about problems like this.
- marcosdumay 4y ago
  Well, a company would do that to get more customers and to fidelize them. But none of that is important on an oligopolized market.
Mizoguchi 4y ago
Absolutely agree. AWS is pretty much a line of credit, unlimited credit actually. When you open a credit card you are usually given a limit, say 10K. If there is a (pretty obvious) suspicious activity on your account it gets disabled, the bank just won't let your card be used indefinitely to buy yachts and planes. And when you contact the bank they won't ask you to go find the bad guys and stop them from using your card before they can help you. That would make absolutely no sense but that's exactly what AWS did in our case.
sofixa 4y ago
> - Solicit a hard limit when you open an account. People can only afford so much, don't bankrupt them. As is said every time this gets proposed, this is not only wildly impractical to implement, but also dangerous from an availability. Why is it impractical? You are billed for active things (running databases, network traffic) but also passive ones such as storage. What do you want AWS to do when you go over the hard limit, delete everything? As for the availability, nobody wants to lose the production environment because nobody has updated the budget with more appropriate values in years. What AWS and GCP do is allow you to set a budget, with notifications however you want them when you approach/hit it. When you get a surprise bill due to a misconfiguration or whatever, you can dispute it and cloud providers are extremely generous with them and usually waive the first few errors. I agree with the rest though.
- oliwarner 4y ago
  Admittedly, I'm no trillion dollar cloud host —and I don't know your perspective here— but I'd expect that a trillion dollar cloud host could look at my billing data at an hourly resolution and fairly accurately predict that that'll look like at the end of the month. They don't need to cut me off right away (unless I'm already outside my budget) but for most bitten people, getting a call the day after making a colossal mistake will save everybody a lot of money and angst. Neither of us needs to negotiate and I don't have to sell Grandma. It's been a few years but the last time I tried AWS's Budgets, it took a hundred clicks or so per service to just get an email out of it. Emails get missed, life gets in the way, etc. The cost to a trillion dollar cloud host to call me up is far less than it would cost you to call me as they off-shore it all. And I'm all for people actively choosing to play without limits. I just think a lot of people a) don't respect that from the off, and b) aren't notified in a timely fashion.

apple4ever 4y ago

That's the human and courtesy way of doing it. Not sure why it's so hard.

sharemywin 4y ago

That's the thing right at some point you should have an account manager. if your spending maybe 4 but definitely 5 figures you should have an account manager. I would argue same on the publisher side.

coldpie 4y ago

That all sounds like it costs money. This is a capitalist society: companies operating correctly should provide as little service as possible for as much money as possible. Nothing you suggest aligns with that goal: -A hard limit? Why limit your income to $600 when your customers can accidentally rack up a $6000 bill? You can even be magnanimous and negotiate it down to a $2000 bill and everyone's happy. -Why would we pay money in monitoring software, SMS & phone call fees to stop a 10,000% revenue increase? -$5 to try to tell a customer not to give us more money? Are you crazy? -People getting sick under capitalism are drags on the economy and should be derided and made as miserable as possible so it doesn't happen again. > Just imagine the quality of life improvements if people felt safe using a cloud provider. We're not here to make people feel safe. We're here to make incredibly rich people even richer. Get on board, man. You'll never operate a successful company with your approach, everyone else will beat you on price.

asplake 4y ago
Just give us the option to pay. Some might call it an insurance premium. (And yes my satire detector is triggered, though one can never be sure)
- midoridensha 4y ago
  The problem is that, very likely, there are decision-makers at these companies that have exactly this reasoning about problems like this.
marcosdumay 4y ago
Well, a company would do that to get more customers and to fidelize them. But none of that is important on an oligopolized market.

Mizoguchi 4y ago

Absolutely agree. AWS is pretty much a line of credit, unlimited credit actually. When you open a credit card you are usually given a limit, say 10K. If there is a (pretty obvious) suspicious activity on your account it gets disabled, the bank just won't let your card be used indefinitely to buy yachts and planes. And when you contact the bank they won't ask you to go find the bad guys and stop them from using your card before they can help you. That would make absolutely no sense but that's exactly what AWS did in our case.

sofixa 4y ago

> - Solicit a hard limit when you open an account. People can only afford so much, don't bankrupt them. As is said every time this gets proposed, this is not only wildly impractical to implement, but also dangerous from an availability. Why is it impractical? You are billed for active things (running databases, network traffic) but also passive ones such as storage. What do you want AWS to do when you go over the hard limit, delete everything? As for the availability, nobody wants to lose the production environment because nobody has updated the budget with more appropriate values in years. What AWS and GCP do is allow you to set a budget, with notifications however you want them when you approach/hit it. When you get a surprise bill due to a misconfiguration or whatever, you can dispute it and cloud providers are extremely generous with them and usually waive the first few errors. I agree with the rest though.

oliwarner 4y ago
Admittedly, I'm no trillion dollar cloud host —and I don't know your perspective here— but I'd expect that a trillion dollar cloud host could look at my billing data at an hourly resolution and fairly accurately predict that that'll look like at the end of the month. They don't need to cut me off right away (unless I'm already outside my budget) but for most bitten people, getting a call the day after making a colossal mistake will save everybody a lot of money and angst. Neither of us needs to negotiate and I don't have to sell Grandma. It's been a few years but the last time I tried AWS's Budgets, it took a hundred clicks or so per service to just get an email out of it. Emails get missed, life gets in the way, etc. The cost to a trillion dollar cloud host to call me up is far less than it would cost you to call me as they off-shore it all. And I'm all for people actively choosing to play without limits. I just think a lot of people a) don't respect that from the off, and b) aren't notified in a timely fashion.