> include customer service at least on par with AWS (which, as far as i'm aware, is basically zilch)
We have a wide variety of customer service options: http://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/
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?