I use GCP and the support I've gotten with a silver plan (their lowest) has been surprisingly good. Low priority stuff like bug reports have been forwarded to developers and occasionally fixed.

High priority tickets I've seen a very good response time on (far better than the minimum guaranteed), though I am going to upgrade to the next level plan to get better response times on the weekend.

I have not used AWS support so I can't compare, but GCP support has been pretty good in my experience.

Merely being a customer is not enough though, without a paid support plan you're basically on your own. This might be standard for cloud providers though from what I can tell.

AWS has a good community. Google cloud hasn't.

I've used Google support in 3 different areas:

1 Google apps (paid), there is a phone number to call. I spent several hours on the phone with a very knowledgeable person helping me troubleshoot a sync issue.

2 Hardware, my android watch died. I called the Google play support number, again talked to a very knowledgeable person who gave me a couple of troubleshooting steps, and then promptly replaced the watch.

3 Google adwords. We regularly talk to people at Google adwords, regarding billing and support issues. I also work with people who speak with support people for Google places (or my business or whatever they're calling it today)

In my experience, Google tech support is great when it's for a product you're paying for. That would be my concern getting 60 days free here... If I was using this for business (and not just messing around) I'd rather just pay for it and know I can get support.

Even paying for Google Cloud is no guarantee of a reliable, robust service. Previous thread on this at: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8784356

https://cloud.google.com/support/ https://support.google.com/cloud/answer/3420056?hl=en&ref_to... https://support.google.com/cloud/answer/3466163?hl=en&ref_to...

Google's support for GCE is no different than Amazon's for EC2 - the more you pay, the more support you get.

This is not doing something extraordinary. My greatest hesitation with Google is being left high and dry in the event of a problem and having to pay big money to MAYBE get a response through God knows what support channel in God knows how much time. Google has to do something fuckin amazing to dispel cynicsm about their support. Your links do nothing like that.

Google thinks it just has to be a clone of amAzon in all ways.

And what would qualify as "fuckin amazing" in your book? Seeing as you apparently have not even tried it out.

Google's support for business customers are entirely different from those for free customers. Which isn't really particularly surprising, given the vastly different scales at which they operate.

Last month, I noticed their whole cloud domain returned 503 for several hours. Google gce uptime, google has nothing except a page of legalese. Yaaa....

I use Google's Pagespeed Service, which is free and in beta. They say they may charge some day. But the support... I have "proxy errors" reported, which would appear to be an error on their end. Contacted support via email and was told to expect a response within 3 business days. So that was Thursday morning, it'll be at least 96 hours before I get a reply. Maybe up to 120 hours. Glad I moved the site instead of waiting.

Agreed. I was once wronged by Google Checkout (before it closed, obviously). I couldn't get any response at all from the company, so I called a few numbers and eventually a random developer at Google looked up and gave me the name and phone number for the director of Google Checkout. I posted the number in a few forums where other incredibly frustrated merchants were looking for help.

Instead of getting some people to respond to the messages these people apparently left, within a day, the number was disconnected. That is how they tend to deal with customer service issues.

Not to defend Google's attitude towards customer service, but you do realize it's inappropriate to post someone's work phone number as a public-facing custom support line, right?

How can you possibly think that was the right thing to do here?

When you see countless stories about small businesses being seriously damaged by a service, it's hard to not want to try to help them.

In no world would what you did help them. Poor judgement.