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Comment by BillinghamJ | Hacker News Reader

Can't say I'm exactly over the moon about this. Although Atlas does seem to be quite a bit cheaper and probably offers a better implementation of the product, mLab's key offering was always the incredibly good support they provide as standard. I haven't needed it often, but I know I can rely on it.

Atlas does not include this - it's something you pay (a lot) extra for and I'm pretty apprehensive about whether it's actually going to be great support or not. At this point my primary worry is that it's going to be more AWS-style support, i.e. expensive and total crap.

The fact that there's no mention of support in the email or blog post does not fill me with hope.

Any Atlas customers who can chime in with their anecdata?

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We migrated from Compose to Atlas and their support's been quite good and responsive. Compose was utter crap compared to what Atlas provides.

We did the same (but to mLab) -- we had a terrible experience at Compose

Would you be open to sharing some details about your experience there? I'm building a competing service and want to learn how I can make it great. If you're not comfortable sharing publically, my email is in my profile.

What didn't you like about the support you got from compose? I'm working on standing up a competing service and would like to learn from your experiences with them.

We also left compose but left to move to mLab. When Compose was still MongoHQ, we were really impressed by their support. In the last few years, we became incredibly unsatisfied. mLab has been awesome and responsive. I hope the move to Atlas doesn't cause their support to change.

Can't agree more on the positive comments about mlab. We migrated to them from compose ~2years ago (after horrible support experiences) and have been happy since. At the time, we looked at atlas and their support offerings for affordable plans was just bad. Also, mlab offered a lot of help in the migration while atlas only sent us some sales guys.

Let's see where this takes us.

I had a similar experience with Atlas. At least 1.5 years ago, Atlas felt like a enterprise company trying to do a SaaS. They used the same sales person driven approach I associate with enterprise sales. mLab just felt far more developer focused.

Here's a blog post that outlines the best MongoDB hosting alternatives - ScaleGrid, Compose, and ObjectRocket. All three have free support, and ScaleGrid allows you to keep full MongoDB admin access and SSH access to your machines. https://scalegrid.io/blog/mongodb-acquires-mlab-what-are-the...

AWS is total crap? We received great support and advice for just $30month extra with AWS. It wasn't emergency support granted but helped us with various cloudwatch setup detailsm

I've had the same experience as you. The people behind the support desk have always been able to assist and find an answer for me. Granted to get them to jump on it quickly I usually have to use the "phone me now" option, but the quality has been the same regardless of how I've approached them.

It really depends on your budget for context. If you're running a solo side-project where your database costs are $5-15 a month, paying more than double that just for basic support is a big pain. The cost of support for a single service might end up being more than the total cost of the rest of your stack (VPS/DB/Domain). If you're at a business then sure, $30 a month is no big deal.

Basic support is free. You pay more for better response times and more users being able to open cases. Having said that it is expensive at business level. 10% of your spend if you want the sort of response times you need in production.

Yeah imo. We have the biz support which is 10% of our spend on AWS resources. We only use it for emergencies or dealing with problems caused by AWS, not for help using the products. They simply aren’t that helpful and are never able to actually resolve anything - typically just provide substandard workarounds.

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