My Netlify account has been suspended, I don’t know why?
answers.netlify.com
answers.netlify.com
I've worked with small providers who don't provide an SLA on support for a $9 tier, and I've worked with large providers with a 2 hour SLA - I can't say that the 2 hour SLA is alway better.
That said, if you rely on something it's incredibly naive to use a free tier and then feel indignant on a forum when you can't immediately get a response.
If a person pays for a thing they are more invested in making it something worthwhile and thus less attacks.
If something is free and any issue, it suddenly is horrible because they never associated value with it from the beginning.
It is a psychological thing and plays into many parts of the market.
Not only that. I would buy paid app only if convinced that it is worth it. I am willing to try free app - and in case that it is garbage, rate it accordingly.
Also, free versions often have strong limitation or massive amounts of ads: so they are worse than paid one.
There’s self selection, if you pay for something then it you’re more selective in what you get. “Free” apps are also worse due to inserting advertising.
I believe, based on other comments I have seen on HN, that my view is a pretty widespread one.
That may be a partial explanation, but I've also heard this frequently from people who sell to only retail customers.
If you're the low cost plumber, pressure washer, or lawn care, you're going to have a headache compared to the people who operate up market.
Incidentally, I remembered his name recently and looked him up. I found an interview where he sold his company for "8 figures" and talked about the joy of "nurturing a team." Not sure the lesson there, but I found it funny.
We were the best deal in town (lowest price and user:line ratio for an unlimited service), so they would usually change their tune, but we had a 2-strike policy, so call and be rude again, and you're out for good.
We didn't end up having to do this that many times, but when we did, it was worth it.
Often your most difficult and abusive customers end up being your least profitable.
There's a saying I like to use: I'll bend over backwards to help you, but I won't bend over forwards.
The real problem is usually the small group of customers who are consistently abusive and excessively demanding and will fly off the handle every other week over some small thing.
Problem is I have a short fuse for disrespect, I just don't have the time to tolerate it.
Where are you getting the idea that they are locked out of support and not their main account, like they are saying in the linked thread?
Not to this specific case, it is not as you imply a case of a single person having a problem and not having timely support, it is a widespread problem or policy somewhere (purposeful or accidental) that collectively harmed many free-tier users.
I don't see how this is any different?
He wasn't harmed in the sense that netlify drove to his house and stabbed him. He lost access to a free food platter.
If people are planning their near future based on what you've said you would likely be giving them, then at some point there is probably some inherited responsibility to at least give the user of that service a heads up so they can make other plans if possible.
If you’re not paying for it you’re not owed anything. Someone was doing you a favour at their expense and then they stopped. If you want something you can rely on pay for it.
While with Netlify the person is back at exactly where they started before Netlify was hosting w/e their project was. So they're in the same neighborhood with the same battery level as they started with.
The free tier is very clearly not for professional work so its really more like if your buddy said they could pick you up but they won't move a couch for you and you showed up with a couch and they just left.
Hmm, moving to a free service can take a lot of time, there might be lock-in?
I don't have specific experience of netlify.
I stayed with my hosting provider despite them doubling my costs just because it would take a long time to find another trustable provider with the offering I need and then a lot of time to move and make sure everything is working.
If it's just a white label service then yes, easy to switch back. If it's not directly comparable then integration costs (in time) can mean you've been "dumped in the road half way there".
Of course if the driver tells you directly "I might have to drop you half way" then that's fine.
It's hard to express how benign most of this is and I'm not trying to oversell the damages, but there is potential for it to be bad and thus at some point there's a responsibility to your users (that champion your product and give you indirect value) to do at least the bare minimum of giving them an email or something.
It certainly takes less time for netlify to send an email than it does for their users to change platforms.
In either case, they fixed the problem, but the expectation of immediate support on a free account is silly.
Which is why it's good to pay for the product to get support once you're dependent on it. It's why cloud providers give companies and devs free credit. Once you've built it on that platform, you're less likely to want to move, and might need to scale, and get support once you're making money. This is how free tiers work, they're basically a demo, and they can cancel accounts for abuse or get around to fixing problems if and when they feel like it. You're also welcome to find another service...that's free, that provides great support and hope they stick around.
Going back to the free sample analogy, you can get one for free, but if you want the full product (including support), you gotta pay.
"pay" is inaccurate. "Consideration" is the word you are looking for. It's silly to think otherwise.
Those are not people who need support. They were locked out with no warning and no explanation.
Netlify's own EULA states (https://www.netlify.com/pdf/self-serve-subscription-agreemen...):
> While we always make an effort to communicate clearly and well in advance if we decide a particular website project is not a good fit for our Free Usage Tier, we reserve the right to disable or remove any website project on Netlify’s Free Usage Tier without notice at our sole discretion
so every free user should very much expect "an effort to communicate clearly and well in advance". They were explicitly told they should.
"we reserve the right to disable or remove any website project on Netlify’s Free Usage Tier without notice at our sole discretion"
That's the promise. Full stop. Everything else is filler words to make that seem more palatable to people.
You are being misled because you are not reading the contract as "a list of things netlify MUST do". Making assumptions based on anything else is folly - you are trusting a commercial entity to be "nice" and that's a really, really bad thing to trust them to do.
I got locked out of the Vercel dashboard for a couple weeks due to a bug. For a $20/user/month paid account, mind you. This support thread feels similar, though unlike what happened to me with Vercel, it appears to be deliberate on Netlify's part.
Cloudflare seems more reliable but https://www.politico.eu/article/sap-cloudflare-enable-russia...
Just because you don't exchange money doesn't mean nothing of value is being exchanged. Netlify does owe people certain things for that exchange. "Nothing" is absolutely and factually false.
Free/Charity food is exempt from safe food policies in many jurisdictions.
That's why so many homeless avoid the local soup kitchens, as they consistently give them food poisoning.
These people aren’t being indignant, just frustrated. You can’t criticize them for expecting help from a support forum either, since apparently that’s the only place where Netlify expects free users to get support.
The headline is exactly correct. There is no editorialising at all.
Additionally, they're not locked out of support, but out of the actual accounts.
I got hit with a random suspension 4-6 months ago. Nothing important there, it was a personal test site and it was a free account. I think there was an option to appeal. Tried that but did not hear back from them. So I just dropped it.
They might have become more aggressive now for what ever reason.
One reason I am trying to shift back to bare metal servers. I had problems with almost all cloud providers(mostly sudden bills with crazy amounts. Plus a lot of them being a nightmare to move off of.). Bare metal is cheaper to run once you get it operational. But takes longer to setup and manage till you get it automated.
Where do you get bare metal server + colo + transfer that's under $19/mth over the typical lifespan? Let's say 5 years, so $1140 in total?
FYI, with dedicated servers you don’t pay for colo separately. It’s included in the monthly fee. Bandwidth also, although on low end plans bandwidth might be limited or metered above some threshold.
Where does co-location and transfer come from when someone says bare metal.
Parent was not happy with cloud providers. Tbh, I see the low end bare metal boxes with automatic provisioning as just another cloud provider. It's just not VMs. Apart from noisy neighbours, you end up with mostly the same types of issues.
There are a few providers offering cheap dedicated servers at that range, OVH's budget lines are popular (though often sold out for that reason): $11/mo for a machine with 2T storage, $17 for 2x2T so you can RAID them for safety, and a bit over your budget one with 3x2T or a pair of 480G SSDs.
But you generally get an ancient CPU, limited bandwidth, and old drives (so I do recommend RAID if you get a machine with more than one drive), with that sort of offer, so if very much depends on what you want to use the resource far. The cheapest machines I mentioned above are Atom N8200s, the next few up old Xeon E3 models, all their budget line are limited to 100mbit, and so on. Depending on your use case this may be a great compromise for guaranteed performance (unlike with a VPS where you may have very noisy neighbours) or if storage is far more important to your application than processing umpf. Of course for other cases it might be a terrible compromise: for many applications the potential to burst CPU use to much more than those Atoms can give you, and/or burst network throughput significantly over 100mbit, will make a VPS with less storage and less performance stability far more attractive. Also a good VPS provider will have good storage redundancy so you don't have to worry about RAID & related (though still, do keep off-provider backups in case of provider failure).
[only picking OVH because I have experience using a couple of their machines, there are other companies with not dissimilar offers]
Another factor is that with there being far fewer budget server providers compared to VPS providers, you might not get a cheap machine in your preferred location. If most of your customer base is in Asia then a server in France or Canada might not be suitable, or if your use case involves holding PII you might need something in your home country to simplify legal matters in that area.
> > Bare metal is cheaper to run
Though that isn't true for all use cases. Maybe not most. For very small workloads, for instance, cloud often wins on both cost and convenience. For larger or less predictable ones though, VPSs and dedicated servers can be better value and more predictable performance and cost (at the expense of some of that convenience). Different jobs, different tools.
Wonder if suspended users have a way to transfer their domains to a different registrar.
It seems one should use a registrar whose primary business is selling domains, and host their content elsewhere.
I read both the title and your comment as "Netflix", and I was surprised at their mission creep.
Sorry if this is a bit off topic.
DNS is taken care by Cloudflare (this can also be by AWS Route53).
Emails, hosts, and others can be with Google, Proton, Fastmail, AWS, et al.
I have heard (know two founders) and I had experienced that domain grabbing-on-search with Godaddy! I won't go anywhere near them.
DirectNIC. Based on Louisiana. Very professional. Been around forever.
Not the cheapest registrar, which is a feature, not a bug.
If your registrar is competing based on nothing but cost, it has to make up the money by cutting elsewhere.
I have heard good things about Cloudflare as a registrar. In-fact, I suggest them to a friend who uses it. However, I user Cloudflare for DNS for most of my domains. SO, I won't move the domains registration to them.
I've been quite happy with Porkbun so far!
Namecheap support seems good, even though they are working out of a warzone.
That said, you’d need to copy all the records you had set
—- “Pro” and “Business” are both self-serve tier plans the support offering there is the same. Currently the support offering is email support with no guaranteed response time. Our self-serve tier is for prototyping, hobbyist or smaller projects and therefore we don’t expect projects with urgent needs or requirements that go beyond self-serve on our self-serve tier. Our enterprise plans are suited for for projects that require more timely responses and more specific attention.
However for full transparency I copied the quotes from the last time that I raised them, and looking back at the original emails it does seem I'd edited them slightly for clarity. The precise quotes of those lines, copied & pasted from the email, including the "for for" are:
—- This is largely because of how our plans are engineered. Our self-serve tier is for prototyping, hobbyist or smaller projects and therefore we don't expect projects with urgent needs or requirements that go beyond self-serve on our self-serve tier. Our enterprise plans are suited for for projects that require more timely responses and more specific attention.
—- 1. Because “Pro” and “Business” are both self-serve tier plans the support offering there is the same, so that would be correct. Currently the support offering is email support with no guaranteed response time
Ultimately all we were seeking was information on if they had a support option with a faster average turnaround than several days, not specifically an SLA, just a better average for "Business" accounts.
The response in both emails touted their Enterprise plan as the only option, and quoted us as:
—- $2,000 is the starting price of our enterprise plans, and that can be priority support or combined with another SKU (HP Edge, HP Build).
I might migrate my site to my own VPS this weekend, just to be safe.
so we can blame the initial thing on incompetence over malice, but then the second thing over incompetent malice because some support staffer can’t act like a human with empathy