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Comment by xiaoma | Hacker News Reader

Here's a thought: Things often go wrong.

Would you rather have your mission critical apps relying on Google's customer service or on Amazon's customer service?

We pay 10+k/mo for our AWS support, and it has never paid off, even with multiple phantom errors and failures... the top level support supposedly being paged out of bed for me doesn't have answers. Always had to simply restore from backup without a good report to share with mgmt.

That's deeply concerning. Can you pls share your aws account ID with me? If you're not comfortavle doing that, pls share email ID where I can contact you. Thanks.

I've actually had good experiences with AWS support. Use the phone call option. Online replies tend to take over 24 hours.

We've actually had good luck with AWS Support and have a dedicated representative that is always there to push urgent issues through support.

Agree. It takes an act of congress to get through to an actual AWS engineer. AWS status site is a joke with how degraded a service needs to be to register a change: https://status.aws.amazon.com/.

You can email me anytime randhunt@amazon.com

I have gotten both stellar and not-so-stellar replies from AWS Support. They used to be slower than ideal but these days it's pretty good. We also have a great line of communication with someone who coordinates SAs to help clients (not sure what his title is) and he can get stuff escalated/sped up. For the most part, we haven't needed that despite his repeated offers to, except in one case, when he was quite insistent which it turned out was for good reason.

Either way I would greatly rather deal with AWS support than Google Support, which as far as I can tell is an oxymoron.

AWS support has been rarely worth the cost in my various stops. Even at the highest support levels. Slow responses, having to deal with people sticking to support scripts, etc.

Are you speaking from experience with Google Cloud Support specifically?

(Disclaimer: I work there.)

Probably speaking from general experience with Google customer support, which is generally opaque. The few times I have corresponded with Google customer support it's been bad.

This is a common sentiment, but I have to say that it's not in line with my experience as a Google Apps/G Suite business customer. If there is an issue, I simply call the phone number, get a competent support representative promptly, and if they can't resolve the issue on my first call, they will follow up and stay on the case. I haven't used GCP yet, so I don't know whether the support will be more like your experience or mine, but I'm confident that Google does have the ability to deliver good customer support.

I'm speaking from my experience of losing access to my YouTube account (same username as I have on this forum) due to having used my gmail address to sign up. Google later started linking everything to plus and somehow my gmail account spawned a new YouTube profile that clobbered my old one.

I spent many, many hours over many years trying to get access to my old account again and never did. Email is pretty sticky, so I'm stuck relying on Google for it, but after this experience I'm overwhelmingly unlikely to ever rely on Google for another service I care about.

I've also had some significant technical issues with other Google services where there is no support (e.g. the talk plugin for Firefox simply won't install and the troubleshooting page suggests using Chrome), but losing my YouTube account is something I'll never forget.

Every experience I've ever had with Amazon's customer service has been fantastic. I wouldn't want to be one of their suppliers but as a customer, they're great.

This.

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