Comment by leros
10 hours ago
I had my GCP quota algorithmically set to 0 after spending 6 months working with them to launch a startup.
I went through a ton of hoops to get approval for our quota. We sent them system diagrams, code samples, financial reports, growth predictions, etc. It was months of back and forth. I'll also add that it was very annoying because they auto-reject your quota request if you don't respond to their emails within 48 hours but their responses take 1-3 weeks. In any case, after 6 months, they eventually approved us for our quota, we launched, and they shut us down to 0 quota across all services the instant our production app got traffic.
We contacted them again asking for help. We never got any human response. We got a boiler plate template a few times, but that was it.
I will never ever ever again use a cloud service where I can't guarantee that I can get good customer service. Unfortunately for a small business that means no big clouds like AWS, GCP, etc.
Yes, I am bitter.
Has AWS support gone downhill in the last two years? I've worked with them in the past - as both an individual and a couple startups - I always reached a human. Issues weren't always resolved as quickly as I'd like but response times were short.
Working in small and medium businesses I've observed the same thing, and I've been quite satisfied with it. So I don't think it's really gone downhill, so GP's comment doesn't really resonate for me, but that isn't to negate their experience. Otoh I keep hearing horror stories about GCP and now I'm reluctant to try it.
Shitting on GCP is just popular on HN and always gets upvoted. AWS and Azure have royally fucked thousands of customers if you care to search for those writeups. My wild ass guess, considering posts like these have zero background details, is that they were careless with service account keys and their account got suspended for mining crypto or something. They also probably weren’t actually paying for support of any kind and that’s why no one is responding to them.
1 reply →
I have the same question. I always got human response after 24-48hours or after one round of messages (with an automated human or machine, not sure). But so far, across 3 accounts and a dozens of correspondence, I always got a human.
Last time I checked you had to pay something like $400/mo extra for legit, timely human support from AWS.
It has!
In the 2010s I always got an AWS support team to help.
Now I get handed off to an external partner of AWS certified contractors.
They are often terrible. They have no backend systems access and just run through the AWS equivalent of "reboot it", "defrag your disk". Basically trying to find an issue in my pipeline. Which they never do because it's the same TF scripts used for years.
Only once we waste time going through the motions do I get passed up to someone who can actually correct the backend issue in the AWS stack itself.
Tbf though I rarely ever have to contact AWS support at this point. The few times I have in the last 2-3 was due to issues after they rolled out an update or with a newer service we wanted to use.
Never have issues with stable services like S3, ECS, EKS, or RDS.
> They have no backend systems access and just run through the AWS equivalent of "reboot it", "defrag your disk"
To be fair I would bet money that the overwhelmingly vast majority of support tickets are exactly those kind of issues, and ones that refer to actual bugs on their end are, comparatively, extremely rare, and should have to be escalated through normal procedures to weed out common problems.
if you want best support (while staying with big cloud) then Microsoft is the best .
Azure has its flaws but Microsoft puts a lot of people and effort behind it . We are not that large but there are so many instances where Microsoft reps will come in call with our customers or their people working with common customers will help out etc.
AWS has a done a decent job of taking enterprise business seriously last 10 years. you can get human support but generally they will charge you , I.e if better support you want you have to pay for premium support plans .
They are constrained unlike MS they don’t have non-cloud large enterprise business relationships for decades M365 or AD etc that helps with building the enterprise DNA.
In all three clouds it works best if you don’t buy directly, buy through a partner reseller , who both have the relationships to the CSP and have the people to work with you .
Sorry, no.
MS is the same network were even their lead engineers answer "well, uhh create a new account and hope you're not banned", when it comes to fixing a illegitimate ban issue.
None of the biggies are good. None of them.
You're better off building your own data enter. Can't believe I'm saying that, but I am. And it doesnt have to be acres and MW and water cooled. It can be a 42U rack.
Hell, I'm a homeowner and have 27U rack with 10U full, battery backup, solar, fiber and a backup internet connection, and stuff.
A small business could easy do this and own the hardware and software to their enterprise. In fact, they probably should. Helps prevent rug pulls!
Now I am curious what is the realistic price a business would expect to put down for a full rack. Say UPS, switch, 4-8U storage, and the rest CPU compute. Without entertaining GPUs, I bet you can get very respectably speced 1-2U servers for $5k a pop. So few hundred thousand probably gets you just an unbelievable amount of horsepower.
1 reply →
Having run a small business on one of the big clouds for almost 10 years now building your own data center is insane advice.
>easy
Hell no
Quota for what? In my experience the GCP service quotas are pretty sensible and if you’re running up against them you’re either dealing with unusual levels of traffic or (more often) you’re just using that service incorrectly.
The quota we needed increased far beyond the usual was the YouTube API. The startup was a media editing and publishing tool, with a feature to upload videos to YouTube on your behalf. Uploading a video requires a ton of quota, which they gave us.
Regardless, dropping all quotas to 0 effectively killed our GCP account.
Interesting. I guess we’ve learned an important lesson in not building businesses around APIs that don’t have an SLA…
2 replies →
> Quota for what?
Sure, I'm interested too.
> In my experience the GCP service quotas are pretty sensible and if you’re running up against them you’re either dealing with unusual levels of traffic or (more often) you’re just using that service incorrectly.
Well 0 is not sensible, and who cares if it's weird if they got detailed approval and they're paying for it.
"... and they're paying for it..." - that might be the exact issue. Google has no way to ensure that these small shops and startups will pay their bill, so quotas are used to prevent the company from running up a large bill they won't be able to pay.
I see a bunch of threads on reddit about startups accidentally going way over budget and then asking for credits back.
This doesn't at all mean the startups have bad intent, but things happen and Google doesn't want to deal with a huge collection issue.
If someone rolled up to your gas station and wanted to pump 10,000 gallons of gas but only pay you next month - would you allow it?
3 replies →
Sure, but the comment is so vague I’m skeptical the OP knew what they were doing in the first place, or it happened exactly as they wrote. Maybe a service quota was reset to the default? But just set to zero? Doesn’t pass the sniff test.
What did your account manager say about this. Getting this interaction right is the core of their job, enabling your business on the platform so you spend more money. With this bad an interaction I'd have asked for a new account manager.
A colleague had a similar quota issue. 4 times quota restoration request was rejected. Upon the final request he put “women owned startup helping underprivileged kids” and it was approved.
It can’t hurt.
> they auto-reject your quota request if you don't respond to their emails within 48 hours but their responses take 1-3 weeks
It boggles my mind anyone would base their business on their good will. By now it should be obvious that companies with a huge number of customers don't care about individual cases that much for obvious reasons. That's why they cut on customer support. You get much better support with smaller companies where you (as an individual or business) are much more important to them.