
Google Cloud shut down this guy's business – but now he's a fan for life - skybrian
http://www.businessinsider.com/google-cloud-won-skeptic-after-shutting-site-down-2016-8
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joesmo
Ridiculous all around. Had a similar thing happen to one of my EC2 instances
on AWS. AWS shut down all outgoing connections, let me know about it, and even
gave me time to investigate. It did not affect any other AWS resource I was
using at the time. To shut down the whole account? I'm sorry, that's not only
insane, stupid, and a huge over reaction, in this industry it's unacceptable.
I don't care what Google offers. They can offer an AI that can pass the Turing
test for all I care and I still would never trust them as my cloud provider.
Ironically, I was looking at them as a target for getting off of AWS. AWS is
far, far, far from perfect requiring customer service interaction every few
days and suffering bugs too numerous to even document (I tried documenting a
couple of months' worth but it was just futile to keep up the record keeping),
but it's leaps and bounds ahead of Google's shitty automations.

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ekidd
There's an important piece of advice for all cloud providers (not just Google)
that's hiding at the end of the article:

 _" While Fred's experience with our appeal process was uncommon, we want to
make sure this situation doesn't happen again in the future. We're evaluating
how we can make changes to our appeal process and overall customer support,
regardless of the support package."_

Based on this remark (and the original article), DocGraph appears to have only
had a entry-level support package for its business. If you're betting your
company on _any_ cloud provider, look carefully at the paid support packages.
If your entire company goes offline, you really want high-priority access to a
human being. Most cloud providers offer this.

This even applies on a smaller-scale services. If a Comcast residential
Internet connection fails, for example, it may take them several days to fix
it. But if you pay twice as much for a business plan, you can get a competent
technician on site the same day.

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splix
I was in similar situation with Google Cloud. My 2 projects were disabled,
they just give me 3 days to send appeal (of course I did it in first 15
minutes). After 3 days without getting response I started complaining on
social media, only after that I got contracted by Google representative and
they fixed this issue. So it took a week to restore my projects.

I wasn't hacked, and didn't do anything wrong. It seems that their thread
detection tools doesn't like when you're using an unusual port and it disabled
my project automatically. It happened to same project few weeks later, again
because of fault on their system. Yes, one of the projects was disabled twice.
Fortunately for this time I have a personal email of the guy who helped
before, so it was quick this time, just few hours of downtime.

Of course you don't get any explanation, just automatic email "your project is
suspended". After this you lose access to you servers, access to project
dashboard and Cloud Logging, you're unable to check what happened, have no
access to db to make backups or move to other server, just nothing, all
disabled. Good job.

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koolba
Click bait title aside, this is still pretty stupid.

> Google then shocked him again, in a good way. Within four hours of tweeting,
> someone from Google had contacted him and had restored access to his
> project.

So the support channel is to bitch on Twitter and hope someone sees it?

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skybrian
There is also the part about the postmortem and making sure it doesn't happen
again.

~~~
michaelt
Yes, no doubt going forward Google support will be easy to contact and this is
the last time I'll see someone take to social media to get a problem with
Google sorted out :)

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marklyon
The optics wouldn't be great, but Google (and their customers) would really
benefit by having a very expensive paid support service available on a per-
incident basis.

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guptaneil
tl;dr Google screws over a startup with their automated processes, startup has
no recourse, startup complains on social media, Google gives them special
attention.

This story is an incredibly common experience from Google, and the only take
away I can get each time I see it is don't use Google unless you have the
social media clout to get their attention when they close your account.

That is a ridiculous customer service model and claims of Google being
"immature," as the article puts it, are seemingly well deserved.

~~~
vgt
You are missing the part about customer's servers being used for malicious
purposes (without their knowledge alas)

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RubyPinch
I noticed (in the original article) an almost complete lack of entertaining
the thought that they mite have (edit: fixed grammer) been acting maliciously
on someone else's behalf. So that is exactly what happened.

And man, I don't know, his whole business gets shutdown automatically, and he
end up liking it for any reason? I think the picture that BI is painting here
is really not properly representative of his views (or at least I'd assume
this is the case)

~~~
parent5446
Quick note, it should be "might have" or "might've", rather than "might of".

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Melk
If that customer service nightmare turned him into a fan he must have very low
expectations.

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mnkmnk
Do you get Google cloud credits if you help them find faults in their service?

