Comment by jayp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jayp | Hacker News Reader

Hi Kevin ;-)

I am founder of another YC backed company. We based our startup on GCP infra. They have great tech (for the most part) but I regret it so deeply for two reasons:

Support or desire to help customers is non-existent. For any questions, they want us to upgrade to paid support and pay them at least 10% more every month for that (we ask like 1-2 questions a year). What? We are already paying you thousands of dollars every month! I get included support for all my software subscriptions - so this is my biggest beef. Also, when they do help, they keep passing you around from team to team and dont resolve issues as well I’d like. It is just not a company I can love as a customer.

Their status dashboard is a joke. They dont even report minor outages, when they do, they start after a huge delay and update very slowly. And worst of all - when it only affects a single zone or a single region, they remove it from historic reports so everything looks green/great.

I’ve experienced both these times multiple times.

I have to assume AWS is better.

Eh. It’s similar in AWS-land.

Basic business hours support is $29/month or 3% of your service spend, whichever is greater. 24/7 is $100/mo or 10%, which also includes outage assistance.

I’ve also worked for places with enterprise support ($15,000/mo or 10%) but of you’re bringing in millions per month it’s definitely worth it.

The AWS personal health dashboard is also pretty reliable. The public status page is the source of many jokes.

While you do pay for AWS support, I must say that in my experience AWS support is pretty top notch. I don't particularly like the (somewhat) recent changes where the priority of your ticket is based on your support plan but I'm guessing it's because everyone always chose "critical" when making small support ticket.

In my experience with AWS support, it's a major difference on whether you are asking EC 2 questions or some of the lesser used service questions.

For Media services, the supporter will almost always need to coordinate with an internal team, which there is no visibility over, and then it becomes a game of telephone to make the supporter relay the information in a way the internal team understands. I've had the same thing happen with peering/networking related questions.

For EC 2, VPC, DynamoDB kinda questions, they are indeed pretty good.

I guess that makes sense. The quality of their support is probably directly correlated to the level of internal tooling to help diagnose issues. For more popular/older services that tooling is probably better.

Thanks for adding the AWS perspective.

I guess grass is not greener on the other side. Oligopolies for the loss.

I don't know about Google's support offerings. But when I worked for a startup that was on AWS, here's what we'd do:

1.) Try to figure things out ourselves 2.) If we can't figure it out, subscribe to AWS Support. 3.) Get question answered and then turn off the support plan.

You'll have your support plan for the rest of the month and pay a prorated amount for the days during which you had support. It's quick and cheap.

You can do the same with GCP

Last I checked GCP has a minimum one month billing for support. Then again, we're talking about $100/mo here, saving half of that pays for how many minutes of engineer time?

Even in the "millions per month" company realm, I've often felt that AWS treated us like a cash cow to some extent.

Appreciate the additional insight. I really wanted to like GCP - they have good people and good tech.

This whole onboarding felt like some caricature of what I thought were exaggerated stories of how bad the support was.

You can get GCP support for as little as $100/month. AWS charges for support too.

https://cloud.google.com/support

>I have to assume AWS is better.

Lol no. AWS NEVER updates its status page unless it is a massive incident that everyone notices.

As for support, if you pay for the most basic plan you will get a basic answer within 48 hours usually. Its decent. The more you pay, the better the support.

Support has been very good for us. Their support pricing model changed from percentage of your bill to a fixed cost per support user

https://cloud.google.com/support

For most organizations role based production plan is good enough

> I have to assume AWS is better.

Did you know that the grass is always greener on the other side?

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