They can be "google" and they can be good at infrastructure but i see "image transfer" is problematic here: i want to know that i can "speak" with someone when something went wrong , past experiences shows it's nearly impossible.
(When my account is locked ,i don't want to loose my servers, email, docs, im, storage and thereafter my job...)
Anymore customer service would result in Google writing my apps for me.
I was trying to get it to work and one of their developers looked at my code and helped me get it running.
Besides that it is trendy to pick on Google, I think that the problem people have had with customer support is mostly with ads.
On the other hand, I was managing the community for that same project through a Google Group, and one day the group simply disappeared for 24 hours or so -- it was as though the group had never existed, but couldn't be recreated. Then it popped into existence again, no explanation. There was absolutely no way to even ask for support, let alone get it.
My takeaway, was, I guess, the obvious one: if you're relying on a web service for something important to your business, you need an SLA. If you're getting a service for free, you should assume it might vanish one day and never come back, taking your data with it. (Especially with a company like Google that's known to let old products languish and to have no meaningful path for reporting problems. ) Sometimes that's OK, sometimes it's not.
In contrast, at least in regards to other amazon services, their customer service is very high.
Amazon has experience providing customer service and are not ADD like google. When they do something, they stick with it and ensure success across the board.
After my experience with the Google App Engine, I will never trust google with anything else anymore, especially anything that is vital to my business.
I find them believing more and more in mouse hover and js animations.
i'm so sick of seeing this come up every time google introduces anything new. they have, at the very least, adequate customer service, as long as you're their customer. as a gmail user you aren't paying them any money and are therefore not a customer. If you pay for google apps, you get customer service. I'm sure that this product will include customer service at least on par with AWS (which, as far as i'm aware, is basically zilch).
you're not going to 'loose' any servers that you are paying for.
This has come up many times in past discussions, and many paying Google Apps customers have explicitly said that they receive little more service than free gmail users.
There was also the developer payment scandal a few months ago, not to mention the gmail and adsense horror stories that I hear about on a regular basis. I lost all my trust and respect for Google after I started using their paid services.
We have a wide variety of customer service options: http://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/
I've been using AWS for a couple years and never really needed support, so never tried to contact them. Recently I was assigned an Account Exec who reached out to make sure everything was cool, introduce himself, and recommend buying into at least the cheapest support tier (which was much cheaper than I had remembered). He then qualified that with great advice: "actually, you can just wait until you need it and sign up right then. No reason to pay before that".
That impressed me.
In addition, Jeff Barr personally emailed me both times I commented on his blog posts about AWS. At random hours of the day. I'm beginning to suspect that "Jeff Barr" is a non de plume fronting a group of people, like Franklin W. Dixon.
JOHN CONSTANTINE
They both look like Sting, that's for sure. Well, Jeff less than John, but even so. Ok, Jeff looks like a actual dude and John Constantine looks like a fictional antihero of questionable allegiance.
I'm not an AWS employee, or friend/spouse/servant of one, but I do run some production systems on AWS.
I gotta give Amazon a plug here just cos they secured my loyalty through what I thought was empowered customer support instead of seeing everything as black and white.
I then locked myself in for 1 year reserved instance pricing it's working out to be less than half of what I would pay for their spot instances over the entire year. I haven't seen too many other vendors offer this kind of discounting or maybe others could enlighten me?
A fair point. But there's a big difference between a company that has provided customer service from the very beginning (even if it was poor at times), and a company that for most of its history has made a concerted effort not to have customer service at all.
This wasn't true in my case; my Google Voice account disappeared when they forced migration of apps accounts to a new system, and the official answer was "ok, here are instructions on how to get a new one."
I don't use Google Voice any more.
I originally hosted my apps with Google App Engine. I experienced several problems with my apps, and I received no response from Google when I emailed their staffers on the google-appengine Google Group. Then came the huge price hike in fall 2011, not to mention that Google shut down their google-appengine-java and google-appengine-python mailing lists and "outsourced" their help to Stack Exchange ( https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/google-ap... ). When I need help with an application, I want help directly from the company, not a third-party site.
I migrated my apps to AWS, couldn't be happier. AWS has their own help forums, filled with staffers constantly answering questions. Not to mention they're constantly lowering prices (seriously, it seems every 4-5 months, AWS announces a price decrease).
For me, I couldn't use GAE or Google's new IAAS until they beef up their customer service.