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Comment by ilyt

3 years ago

It's sad none (I think?) of the big cloud providers doesn't allow for prepaid account, it would solve both "our idiots thought that blocking long-term paying customers with no human intervention is a good idea" and "I woke up this morning with $20k AWS bill" problems

7 comments

ilyt

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fnordpiglet  3 years ago

Aws has no provision for shutting stuff down for exceeding a budget (or at least when I ran services there). We would rather reverse your $20k bill and keep you alive. I ate huge write downs from small and big customers accidentally blowing themselves up. I remember on guy almost in tears because he knew he would be fired due to his screw up that blew up the bill. It made me proud to help him. Amazon has a ton of serious issues but they are genuinely incentivized to care about customer problems (I.e., you are paid and promoted on how far you go for customers).

  • 0cf8612b2e1e  3 years ago

    > We would rather reverse your $20k bill and keep you alive

    And as a customer, I never want to be in a position where I ever see $megabill. Maybe I might be able to get reversed if the gods smile upon me that day, but it would be incredibly stressful until I had resolutions. Seems an obvious blindside for “customer obsessed”. Anything I might host is practically a joke for which I would gladly have the provider pull the plug if billing suddenly spiked above pre-established threshold. I’ll take the downtime if it helps me sleep at night.

    • wingleader  3 years ago

      I've had the exact polar opposite experience on any company running systems with paying customers. Usually it's "don't care what it costs, just fix it" which lines well with AWS' behaviour on this. When downtime costs tens of thousands of dollars _a minute_, people tend to stress less about some inefficiencies like this

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  • ilyt  3 years ago

    I'd still rather not have that issue in the first place. Throw next ~3 months of money onto prepaid account and sleep soundly.