Comment by danpalmer
5 years ago
I use Google Cloud and the support has been pretty good. We have an account manager, engineering support contacts, all sorts. We also have SLAs so they can't just cut off our account.
There's a difference between someone with a Gmail account who added a card to GCP and spun up a VM, and a business with a business account. Google support isn't there for the former, but there's plenty of it for the latter.
I can sign up to AWS and get world class service on day one with just a credit card.
That’s the bar.
It's not the criticism being levelled here, that Google has no support.
I'd also say that it's not a particularly useful end of the market. If I were to judge a cloud provider purely on their "day 1" experience I'd just go to Digital Ocean, it's far better than AWS at that level.
And that absolutely works on GCP too. In similar way, even.
You just add "support contract" on that credit card (without it, AWS is just as likely to ignore you too)
Not true. I've found AWS support really helpful even on accounts without a support contract. Super fast, responsive and professional.
I love Google Cloud for its technology, but their support needs improvement.
The more fundamental issue here is a lack of trust. Google has lost it due to years of this stuff, and it will take a lot more than “we actually do have support on GCP” to rebuild it.
> I use Google Cloud and the support has been pretty good. We have an account manager, engineering support contacts, all sorts. We also have SLAs so they can't just cut off our account.
That may be true, but many people won't even try it to find out because "Google" itself is synonymous with "customer service black hole". They should have given their cloud product a name other than "Google", similar to how Microsoft named their offering "Azure" and not "Microsoft Cloud" - if Microsoft (the name) has bad rep, they can just drop that moniker to preserve their cloud offering as simply "Azure".
Even if so, people will judge and measure by the long list of Google services cut-off just „because“ and sometimes on short notice.
Would I start any new business on GVP? Never, now, because I would be scared that they just change something that breaks my app because they can.
> We also have SLAs so they can't just cut off our account.
hold my datacenter
Do they have to honor the SLA if you are doing stuff against their ToS or if you were hosting illegal content?
I'm pretty sure they can and will shut your account off if they think you are being naughty, that's the problem with AI making decisions. The reasons are good enough.
I'm saying this as a heavy GCP user. What we did are the usual recommendations, have an extra owner for the projects as a fallback (not a fake backup account for the love of god, someone real and trustworthy). Buy your domains somewhere else. Have backups/replication outside Google's reach. Have a doomsday scenario plan to bring everything up.