Yep. For me it was running instances that didn't respond to requests to delete or stop. They kept charging anyway.
Support was somebody in a different timezone who complained when I didn't answer my phone in the middle of the night. I quite liked the Google Cloud offering, but to get so burnt so quickly... stay away.
Sorry to hear about this. I work for our cloud platform support team ( we don't cover firebsse) and this is not the impression we want our customers to get.
We don't want to be calling customers in the middle of their night while they are sleeping. Its not an effective way to resolve issues. We need help identifying when we fall short so we can fix the issues.
Ways to let us know:
1) fill out the survey when your case is closed. We review every survey but less then 1% of cases get the survey filled out.
2) tweet your case id at us and it also goes through our review process
3) email me ([email protected]) and I can correct the problems.
4) GCP slack community has a whole bunch of active Googlers (and the community will flag one us down) if you are having problems with the support team.
I did that. It took me two years to move everything over (email took the longest time), but it's been totally worth it. I still have my @gmail address, but it's only there to forward email to my real address, and I never log in or send email. Besides junk mail and spam, I am now at a point where I get maybe 1-2 real emails on my @gmail account, and then I tell the sender to use my new address.
My google usage is now
1. Occasionally watching Youtube videos in an incognito window
2. Very rarely using !g to search Google via DDG
3. Using Gmaps in an incognito window a couple times a month
and that's it. I don't find that I miss it at all. If I had to stop using Youtube and Gmaps, I won't miss 'em.
I pay for G Suite and basically the only thing anyone uses is Gmail. I don't have hard proof but I feel that all of my emails from my ___domain never go to spam. I one time had to use Godaddy's email system and ALL emails went to people's spam folder. It is like Google makes you pay for email or your emails won't get delivered properly. Maybe it was Godaddy's mail system's IP that was blacklisted but I think you have to pay to play these days.
Is there some criterion by which GoDaddy is not the worst service provider? Given their popularity with ___domain parkers and other less savory parts of the IT world, I would assume that the blame was entirely on their shoulders. That said, configuring an email server correctly seems to be rather an involved process[0] so we should perhaps not rule out some measure of incompetence as well as shadiness.
The reason we're all here, support. One of the reasons GoDaddy is a company I still use and have used for years is that they have 24/7 telephone support that's reasonably decent. I have called and gotten ___domain issues sorted by GoDaddy at 2 AM on a Sunday by a dude who didn't have a foreign accent.
I'm not a big account with them, surely trivial compared to those mass ___domain parkers you mention, but they've never made me feel like I was less valued as a customer. I have received calls from humans just to ask me if I am currently satisfied with my service with them.
Especially if you have a business-critical service, this should simply be a baseline requirement for support, but it's becoming shockingly rare these days.
I've had the complete opposite experience with GoDaddy support. Many of them are not so knowledgable and can easily waste time, and billing matters in particular can be quite disorganized with them if something goes wrong. I moved all my domains way from GoDaddy.
Yeah, I thought I'd miss GMail, but I really didn't. I used Google Inbox for a while too and thought I'd miss that, but now I use Spark as my mail client so I don't even miss that either.
It was more of a mental "but but my decade-long history of gmail" thing, but it turned out that really was less of a big deal than I thought. I now have a nice custom ___domain and I forward my gmail to my fastmail, updating subscriptions every so often. Eventually gmail will receive no more mail I care about and I will remove the forwarding altogether. Its getting there!
This. I too dreaded the switch because of all the history, but the migration to fastmail was quick and painless, and I lost nothing. (Arguably, losing everything would've been better, so much useless noise in my history.)
Looking back on it now, about a year after migrating, my only regret is I didn't do it sooner.
Exactly the same experience for me. It's so much faster, more convenient and useful, and the migration tool was a breeze to use, I should have done it years ago.
I just stopped by to join the little FastMail fan crowd over here.
If you aren't a FastMail customer yet, you're gonna assume we're shills. We're not, it's just the sort of quality product that makes you want to tell others. It's like having found Gmail in 2005.
That seems like a minor issue in comparison to the issues with google discussed here. I mean, sure, they should honour the lifetime membership, but is it really worth losing sleep over something you paid $15 for 15 years ago (at the time of that message)?
Sure, but the sentiment in this entire discussion is how unreliable googles paid for service is (never mind their free stuff - have you ever tried to get support from google for gmail or other feee service? From what I've heard it's like talking to a wall). I'd rather pay for good service than get unknown service for free.
Now, if only good and valuable startups weren't getting bought by google by the dozens :( I guess it's your cue to start migrating to something in house when it happens.
I use GCP for "small stuff" and never have any issues at all: using GAE with the maximum number of instances set to 1 on a paid plan, using cloud storage to host static web sites, and occasionally spin up a really large VPS (their maximum memory and CPU core offering) for a short time periods to run machine learning and other large tasks.
Yes, for that reason a POC I made for a side project costed almost 100 bucks to me (I was the single user)... I never checked the current bill because I was sure the total cost would have been around 15-20... when I got charged I noticed all the previous pushed versions had a single instance running, so the costs were incremental...
Let's just say that testing out the platform by pushing a 1 page test app a few times and then being burned by a $200 bill has put me off the platform for a while.
It may be my fault for not adequately reading all their caveats, but it seems to me that the default experience shouldn't be like that.
I love Google, but their Cloud Platform is still incomprehensible to me.
AFAIK this doesn't happen by default, since by default the autoscaling will reduce instance count to 0 if the old versions aren't receiving any traffic.
"What do you mean, you retain a running instance of every previous instance I pushed?!"
Fun times.