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Comment by andrewinardeer | Hacker News Reader

I know I'm going to come off as a Google apologist, however, I'm leaning towards there being more to the story than what you are saying.

The previous month's billing didn't 'went through' and you are unable to zero in on whether this is a Google issue or a you issue.

I get that it is easier to complain on the internet and often cathartic do so as a coping mechanism.

Having an account suspended because of a billing issue is not exclusive to Google.

Have you moved your projects off GCP now as voting with your wallet would be the sensible thing to do. Until you encounter a billing issue with AWS and move again to Azure and then to DO.

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>Having an account suspended because of a billing issue is not exclusive to Google.

I'm sorry but :

>Despite reassurances "your account will not be suspended" while communicating with billing support, all the projects were suspended at 1am on Saturday.

If he contacted someone at customer support, after making sure the mistake was corrected (on whatever side it was) and they assure him that the account will not be suspended - what the fuck is he supposed to do about it beyond that ?

Imagine having your business/job fucked up over an incompetent customer support system.

GCP is a SPoF. If you care about your availability, avoid single points of failure. Then it doesn't matter if what support tells you turns out to be not true.

How you do that can vary, but ... billing issues are always a risk. Having two cards, with two different banks, and two different names, is a pretty basic precaution to take. Having multiple cloud providers closes out a bunch more existential risks.

DNS is the one unavoidable SPoF for most Internet businesses: you cannot have a "backup registrar". The best you can do here is pay for a quality service provider: someone who will call you if there's a problem, before they cut you off. That's going to cost a lot more than GoDaddy, btw.

> Until you encounter a billing issue with AWS and move again to Azure and then to DO.

You have to be joking or ignorant. I have never met someone who had a billing issue with AWS that wasn't able to be resolved without shutting off access.

I have never seen a story bubble up on HN about someone who had their account terminated by AWS for no obvious reason.

Perhaps Google is subject to an ongoing smear campaign, or they just attract people who don't know how bill paying works and Google has been completely reasonable. What I do know is that both AWS and Azure have been completely open, honest and will send engineers, account managers or whenever was required to get problems resolved without business impact when I was at both large corporation and early stage startup.

I have never encountered this with any interaction with Google, so it can't be part of their corporate culture, which makes it very unlikely that Google Cloud can be much different.

> we won't allow you to sell any cloud-related services anymore until you don't have proper customer service

No, they attract and select people who see the world only from an engineering perspective. Combined with Google's cultural roots that come from MIT, where projects and services are things that are funded by the government, military or megacorporations in which you can pull the plug whenever and the other side would not flinch, this makes them totally blind to the existence of humans on the other side of their services. Resulting in an false reality in which you, me and the millions of other people who depend on their services do not exist.

So you see things like this happen. Things like 'deprecating' products in people's faces. Things like 'combining and merging and unmerging products because it makes more engineering sense' and creating messes like "Google Gmail Hangouts Chat Rooms Meet" or whatever they are calling the frankenstein they made by combining all those.

Not the same person, but this sounds very similar to an experience I had. Payments fail all the time for various reasons, that isn't really the issue. It's what happens after that.

In our case our bank blocked transactions to AWS and Google one night. I contacted the bank and Google, made arrangements and successfully paid the account within a day. I just retried the AWS payment and had no further issues with them.

I had issues with Google for months. Google kept sending me threatening messages about how our accounts suspension is imminent. We'd then follow up with a human, have it resolved, only for the same thing to happen weeks later. Note that there were no outstanding payments, and no failed payments again.

After ranting to friends in startups it became apparent that this was not an isolated incident, and it's always Google.

Google is the outlier here. Relative to their competition, they're both new at public-facing corporate Cloud offerings(1) and new at non-scalable customer service issues.

They're playing catch-up, and customers are at risk while they do so.

(1) AWS had a head-start on Google and Google's been chasing AWS's monetization strategy and away from their Google App Engine approach, which was fundamentally different. Azure may be more contemporary to Google's Cloud, but Microsoft has a tried-and-true large-scale corporate customer support engine that Google's only now being forced to build out to support its Cloud offering (the customer support story for ads was fundamentally different, and Apps for Domains didn't have the scale Cloud now does).

(I just wanted to say thank you for using the word "apologist" so I didn't have to.)

That was really all I had: expressions of astonishment at the prevalence of Google apologist comments here today.

In an effort to be constructive let me say, it's a matter of scale. Google can't be fair because of their scale. Contrariwise, I use small-scale services and get outstanding customer service.

E.g. Tarsnap, cperciva is a god among men when it comes to customer service. Or sr.ht (Sourcehut) ddevault is right there on IRC most days. Or Podia, I wanted a certain font on my site, they didn't have it, I emailed them about it and they literally added it within the hour. Give these folks your money, eh?

No human working at Google will do an account suspension on a Saturday.

So it must have been automation. And there is a very good chance that automation simply hadn't been blocked by the support agent which had been giving reassurances.

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