Just because they don't offer a response SLA for those tiers doesn't mean they don't provide timely support. Getting support under your SLA from other providers can be a person acknowledging your email and then asking for more information that you've already provided.
The same person who quoted the sales team said customer support usually replies quicker via the forum than via email which would be the official support channel.
To be clear, i'm not against best-effort support and that's actually what i use and provide year long (i never sign SLAs). I'm just saying it's scammy to call a plan without SLA "pro". Things can go wrong and things will go wrong, but when you can't have an actual human acknowledging your problem in the next few work hours, that's certainly not what i would call "pro" service.
> Getting support under your SLA from other providers can be a person acknowledging your email and then asking for more information that you've already provided.
Or worse, trying to turn it into a sales call. Every time I've talked to Comcast (Xfinity) lately about my internet not working, they've tried to sell me phone service. Very frustrating. I'm calling you about a product that doesn't work; what makes you think I'm interested in _another_ product from you at this time? Maybe reserve the upsell until _after_ the problem is resolved? /rant
I'll admit, I have no idea why southerntofu said non-profit, I was simply following the ethos of the comment and suggesting a service that is (seemingly) not being monetized while being quite reliable.
I'll admit, I have no idea why southerntofu said non-profit, I was simply following the ethos of the comment and suggesting a service that is (seemingly) not being monetized while being quite reliable.
Since someone named Github Pages, i feel obligated to name Codeberg Pages, owned by a non-profit association. Or Sourcehut Pages, not sure about the legal entity but the business model is very clear and sound.
Otherwise, there's the usual bunch of non-profit hosts: the tilde servers (sdf & friends), the hosting coops from libreho.st or chatons.org federations, as well as the radical hosts for more political content (blackblogs, noblogs, etc).
Shoutout to neocities.org if user-friendly, retro-style websites are your thing.
Sourcehut is not free, but they public financial reports and have details about their economic model which seems very sustainable. As for being "alpha", it only shows how much the team cares about not making false promises which seems a lot better than relying on companies promising everything and unicorns delivered to your door.
As for other services i've mentioned, they're not "free" either. They're usually free price (donation based) or ask for a fixed membership fee. Running things has a cost, but by going with a non-profit host you usually have better durability. sdf.org or marsnet.org have been running for over 20 years, can you say the same about any free offering by a startup ?
Sounds darker when you have taken the second half away: "when you can avoid it."
There are two arms to it inth ecase of hosting:
1. Not putting your eggs in one basket: have a tested backup/DR plan so if a host goes bad you can move easily.
2. Always remember that they have a bottom line, and it is more important to them than your bottom line. Any claim otherwise should be viewed with suspicion. Also if you are on a free (or just very cheap) tier you will be a lot less important than customers on higher tiers.
This headline is definitely not correct - the actual heajne should be "some reports of free tier users being locked out of their netlify support".
I've worked with small providers who don't provide an SLA on support for a $9 tier, and I've worked with large providers with a 2 hour SLA - I can't say that the 2 hour SLA is alway better.
That said, if you rely on something it's incredibly naive to use a free tier and then feel indignant on a forum when you can't immediately get a response.
Often it's the case that the less a customer is paying, the more indignant they feel they can be with support. I don't know why this is. You get more reasonable customers with higher pricing. I imagine a free tier attracts all sorts of riff raff.
> the free one will be rated lower because of perception.
Not only that. I would buy paid app only if convinced that it is worth it. I am willing to try free app - and in case that it is garbage, rate it accordingly.
Also, free versions often have strong limitation or massive amounts of ads: so they are worse than paid one.
You are missing the major differences between the users and apps being compared.
There’s self selection, if you pay for something then it you’re more selective in what you get. “Free” apps are also worse due to inserting advertising.
My guess as to why, is that the kinds of people who are paying the higher tiers are companies. The person(s) interacting with support are on the payroll of the company experiencing problems. So it's all a very professional conversation.
right, I might consider that a large number of the services my employer has paid for are crap, but when I talk to representatives of those services I can't say why in hell did you decide to do this idiotic crap because their HR would complain to my employer's HR and thus I am forced to be polite. Definitely a win for professional etiquette.
I believe, based on other comments I have seen on HN, that my view is a pretty widespread one.
Who's gonna complain and argue more over $5, a poor person or a rich person? If you concentrate on the "value" market people will concentrate on getting value out of you. That totally includes rich but cheap people, which are very much a thing.
Seems like a reasonable guess if you assume most or all of the paying customers are companies, but that might be unrealistic to assume, and individual consumer behavior has been studied a lot; it’s widely known in retail business that people often don’t value free things. The relationship between price and product engagement is complicated. Having run a site myself that offered a free tier and a paid tier, I experienced exactly the same thing: free customers were noticeably more demanding and less patient than the paying customers. Initially I sold paid plans almost entirely to individuals, not companies, and still saw this behavior. So my guess is that people who invest financially in their tools are willing to work to improve them, hence interested in having a polite and productive relationship with the company that makes their tools. Free users want the product to work right now, and because they’re not paying, they don’t expect it to change. There might be a bit of free users acting more aggressively out of fear that they won’t be listened to because they’re on the free tier, and hoping that public shaming, instead of money, will get the company to act. At least that what it feels like on the support end of this.
IMO it comes down to the cost of burning the bridge. The free to $10/mo user likely won't even notice if they get banned from the service. But the company spending $5000/mo on the service will likely have the worst week of their lives if they get banned...
I've noticed this is also true in regards to how employers treat employees. Low wage workers are treated like shit, and higher wage workers tend to enjoy more flexibility and benefits. How much someone is willing to pay you for your labor may in fact be a direct measurement of how much they value you as a person.
I think you might have this flipped (not that it's any better). If someone pays you more, they assume you're more valuable and to some extent assume you're a better person.
I think we're in agreement on that point. It may go even further though, and I suspect the act of paying someone poor wages in of itself leads to perceiving them as property.
We had an "indie hacker" using our product who would write in a really abusive manner over and over. I could never figure out why he didn't just go with another company.
Incidentally, I remembered his name recently and looked him up. I found an interview where he sold his company for "8 figures" and talked about the joy of "nurturing a team." Not sure the lesson there, but I found it funny.
Back in the 90s I managed a dial-up ISP and I had a policy that if a customer calling support was overly rude to my agents, we would just tell them "I guess we're not the company for you, let's start the cancellation process".
We were the best deal in town (lowest price and user:line ratio for an unlimited service), so they would usually change their tune, but we had a 2-strike policy, so call and be rude again, and you're out for good.
We didn't end up having to do this that many times, but when we did, it was worth it.
Often your most difficult and abusive customers end up being your least profitable.
I have zero tolerance at my organization for customers that are rude and nasty. If you send us a support request that is filled with profanities and demands out of the gate, I'll gladly refund your money and terminate your account immediately.
There's a saying I like to use: I'll bend over backwards to help you, but I won't bend over forwards.
I find that if you reply factually and ignore the abuse that people will often come back with "sorry for my rudeness earlier, I had a bad day" or some variant thereof, completely unprompted. Even without apology I think the rare rudeness is fine, even though I really dislike it. No one is perfect and we got to accept that.
The real problem is usually the small group of customers who are consistently abusive and excessively demanding and will fly off the handle every other week over some small thing.
Interestingly enough, something I learned early in my career during sales training is that if you are able to convert your biggest haters, they can become one of your most ardent supporters.
Problem is I have a short fuse for disrespect, I just don't have the time to tolerate it.
> Since yesterday I am getting this message as I try to login into my netlify account and due to this I am unable to access my account and also my some of important projects which I have deployed on netlify, failed to work properly which contains my portfolio and some of major projects which I had mentioned them in my resume.
Where are you getting the idea that they are locked out of support and not their main account, like they are saying in the linked thread?
I hate the prevailing sentiment around here that if you are not paying then you deserve all harm to comes to you. If I get free food sample from a brand I fully expect that it should comply with the same sanitary/health standards as a paid product, food makers can't just shrug a harmful contamination/spoiling in free samples and then just go "they are not paying so not my problem". We must hold free tech services to the same high standards.
Not to this specific case, it is not as you imply a case of a single person having a problem and not having timely support, it is a widespread problem or policy somewhere (purposeful or accidental) that collectively harmed many free-tier users.
not necessarily true...imagine you're a kid with tech skills and you've made the local news for making a free to use website that tracks public transport buses that over the course of a month or two disadvantaged people come to rely on...then that service goes away suddenly while some disadvantaged person is out doing something in extreme weather...now that disadvantaged person has to go wait for the bus in extreme weather for a substantially longer period of time which could easily make them sick which could easily be a life altering experience for them.
I mean... I also expect the people handing out the free samples to be able to say "no more" to me. I'm not paying them, and they can stop being "nice" at any point without doing anything wrong.
I don't see how this is any different?
He wasn't harmed in the sense that netlify drove to his house and stabbed him. He lost access to a free food platter.
A possibly better analogy would be if a ride-share gave you a free ride to a concert and all of your friends have used that free ride without issue but then the ride-share company forced you out of the ride halfway to the concert without warning and said "should've read the fine print not our problem!" - now you're possibly in a bad neighborhood with a dead phone battery in a much worse place than you would've been if you never trusted the free service to begin with (and I would suggests it's not hard at all to imagine a scenario with more dire consequences in this situation)
If people are planning their near future based on what you've said you would likely be giving them, then at some point there is probably some inherited responsibility to at least give the user of that service a heads up so they can make other plans if possible.
> If people are planning their near future based on what you've said you would likely be giving them, then at some point there is probably some inherited responsibility to at least give the user of that service a heads up so they can make other plans if possible.
If you’re not paying for it you’re not owed anything. Someone was doing you a favour at their expense and then they stopped. If you want something you can rely on pay for it.
The ride analogy is not a good one because you're in a different spot from where you started.
While with Netlify the person is back at exactly where they started before Netlify was hosting w/e their project was. So they're in the same neighborhood with the same battery level as they started with.
The free tier is very clearly not for professional work so its really more like if your buddy said they could pick you up but they won't move a couch for you and you showed up with a couch and they just left.
>While with Netlify the person is back at exactly where they started //
Hmm, moving to a free service can take a lot of time, there might be lock-in?
I don't have specific experience of netlify.
I stayed with my hosting provider despite them doubling my costs just because it would take a long time to find another trustable provider with the offering I need and then a lot of time to move and make sure everything is working.
If it's just a white label service then yes, easy to switch back. If it's not directly comparable then integration costs (in time) can mean you've been "dumped in the road half way there".
Of course if the driver tells you directly "I might have to drop you half way" then that's fine.
It takes a couple of minutes to setup services like these (be it netlify, vercel, Cloudflare, etc.) You connect your repo, tell it what command to run, and then which directory to grab. If you’re using a popular framework like Hugo they’ll often auto detect all of those settings for you.
They are not interchangeable though and that's the crux of it. When a service like this tells you you're eligible for using their product for free and then boot you off their service, they are potentially leaving you in a worse state than if you had never used their service to begin with.
It's hard to express how benign most of this is and I'm not trying to oversell the damages, but there is potential for it to be bad and thus at some point there's a responsibility to your users (that champion your product and give you indirect value) to do at least the bare minimum of giving them an email or something.
It certainly takes less time for netlify to send an email than it does for their users to change platforms.
Right, its called vendor lock in. It's why a lot of services offer a free tier, to reduce the upfront investment in the hopes you'll settle in and eventually pay. It's why students get free software licenses, etc. It's a valid way of doing business, and its not like the consumer isn't aware of the risks. If you want to support a business on a free demo, don't get mad when you get no SLA.
In either case, they fixed the problem, but the expectation of immediate support on a free account is silly.
> Hmm, moving to a free service can take a lot of time, there might be lock-in?
Which is why it's good to pay for the product to get support once you're dependent on it. It's why cloud providers give companies and devs free credit. Once you've built it on that platform, you're less likely to want to move, and might need to scale, and get support once you're making money. This is how free tiers work, they're basically a demo, and they can cancel accounts for abuse or get around to fixing problems if and when they feel like it. You're also welcome to find another service...that's free, that provides great support and hope they stick around.
Going back to the free sample analogy, you can get one for free, but if you want the full product (including support), you gotta pay.
People who signup for free accounts generally provide personal data in exchange for services according to the ToS they agreed to while signing up. You are owed what is prescribed in the ToS and other agreements.
"pay" is inaccurate. "Consideration" is the word you are looking for. It's silly to think otherwise.
Not really. OPs analogy is closer. It’s more like you’ve been getting free samples and eating them, then they said “ok, no more” without prior warning. You wouldn’t expect them to have to give you a discontinue warning and a grace period for you to find another free sample provider
I definitely would, and I have received such warning from more professional providers. Even my local grocery store sends an email when canceling tasting and marketing events. I don't know why you think otherwise.
> While we always make an effort to communicate clearly and well in advance if we decide a particular website project is not a good fit for our Free Usage Tier, we reserve the right to disable or remove any website project on Netlify’s Free Usage Tier without notice at our sole discretion
so every free user should very much expect "an effort to communicate clearly and well in advance". They were explicitly told they should.
See - I read that exact same message, and applying my "contract legalese" filter I come away with the utter opposite opinion.
"we reserve the right to disable or remove any website project on Netlify’s Free Usage Tier without notice at our sole discretion"
That's the promise. Full stop. Everything else is filler words to make that seem more palatable to people.
You are being misled because you are not reading the contract as "a list of things netlify MUST do". Making assumptions based on anything else is folly - you are trusting a commercial entity to be "nice" and that's a really, really bad thing to trust them to do.
No one is saying they broke the law, just that it's very unprofessional and should be taken as a sign of unreliability, in stark contrast to someone who provides free samples and then stops.
That's not a fair comparison, it would be more like if they run out of samples you can't demand more, or if you've already had 10 you might have to expect them to say no, or if you don't like the toppings, you can't really ask for substitutions.
So the word shouldn't get out that their public image is false? They and the other players are part of a trend that discourages people from setting up their own VPSes, saying it's a pain in the ass. Well so is Netlify, Vercel, and fly.io only you're also learning skills you can't use when you decide to leave one of these vendors.
I got locked out of the Vercel dashboard for a couple weeks due to a bug. For a $20/user/month paid account, mind you. This support thread feels similar, though unlike what happened to me with Vercel, it appears to be deliberate on Netlify's part.
The consideration here is the exchange of personal information for services, as covered by the ToS. The belief that money is the only acceptable form of consideration is foolish and not realistic.
Just because you don't exchange money doesn't mean nothing of value is being exchanged. Netlify does owe people certain things for that exchange. "Nothing" is absolutely and factually false.
It’s ironic that you say the headline is incorrect, when your replacement headline is the incorrect one. The users are complaining because they’ve been locked out of their netlify account, not their “netlify support” like you stated.
These people aren’t being indignant, just frustrated. You can’t criticize them for expecting help from a support forum either, since apparently that’s the only place where Netlify expects free users to get support.
I got hit with a random suspension 4-6 months ago. Nothing important there, it was a personal test site and it was a free account. I think there was an option to appeal. Tried that but did not hear back from them. So I just dropped it.
They might have become more aggressive now for what ever reason.
One reason I am trying to shift back to bare metal servers. I had problems with almost all cloud providers(mostly sudden bills with crazy amounts. Plus a lot of them being a nightmare to move off of.). Bare metal is cheaper to run once you get it operational. But takes longer to setup and manage till you get it automated.
Online.net is the first one that comes to mind. There are others.
FYI, with dedicated servers you don’t pay for colo separately. It’s included in the monthly fee. Bandwidth also, although on low end plans bandwidth might be limited or metered above some threshold.
> Where does co-location and transfer come from when someone says bare metal.
Parent was not happy with cloud providers. Tbh, I see the low end bare metal boxes with automatic provisioning as just another cloud provider. It's just not VMs. Apart from noisy neighbours, you end up with mostly the same types of issues.
There are a few providers offering cheap dedicated servers at that range, OVH's budget lines are popular (though often sold out for that reason): $11/mo for a machine with 2T storage, $17 for 2x2T so you can RAID them for safety, and a bit over your budget one with 3x2T or a pair of 480G SSDs.
But you generally get an ancient CPU, limited bandwidth, and old drives (so I do recommend RAID if you get a machine with more than one drive), with that sort of offer, so if very much depends on what you want to use the resource far. The cheapest machines I mentioned above are Atom N8200s, the next few up old Xeon E3 models, all their budget line are limited to 100mbit, and so on. Depending on your use case this may be a great compromise for guaranteed performance (unlike with a VPS where you may have very noisy neighbours) or if storage is far more important to your application than processing umpf. Of course for other cases it might be a terrible compromise: for many applications the potential to burst CPU use to much more than those Atoms can give you, and/or burst network throughput significantly over 100mbit, will make a VPS with less storage and less performance stability far more attractive. Also a good VPS provider will have good storage redundancy so you don't have to worry about RAID & related (though still, do keep off-provider backups in case of provider failure).
[only picking OVH because I have experience using a couple of their machines, there are other companies with not dissimilar offers]
Another factor is that with there being far fewer budget server providers compared to VPS providers, you might not get a cheap machine in your preferred location. If most of your customer base is in Asia then a server in France or Canada might not be suitable, or if your use case involves holding PII you might need something in your home country to simplify legal matters in that area.
> > Bare metal is cheaper to run
Though that isn't true for all use cases. Maybe not most. For very small workloads, for instance, cloud often wins on both cost and convenience. For larger or less predictable ones though, VPSs and dedicated servers can be better value and more predictable performance and cost (at the expense of some of that convenience). Different jobs, different tools.
I would always suggest decoupling domain registrar from everything else -- emails providers, DNS providers, other hosts, etc. Take care of your domain and be able to point anywhere, then the DNS provider to be able to again point to any hosts.
I've heard through the grapevine that Namecheap will buy and resell domains based on what you search. does anyone know if there is veracity to this claim?
Anecdote - I've used their domain search tool quite a bit and I've never run into an instance of a domain suddenly being unavailable when I go to register it.
I hope my experiences continues. I have had, so far, no issues. In-fact, I have recovered quite a few lost domains, forgotten renewals etc with the help of their support team.
I have heard (know two founders) and I had experienced that domain grabbing-on-search with Godaddy! I won't go anywhere near them.
Avoid resellers / 'cheap' registrars like NameCheap, GoDaddy. DNS propagation, domain 'locking', etc. is so much easier to manage and faster using registrars who care about their business. Hover comes to mind, recently I've transferred everything to CloudFlare.
Ah! Will think over this. I have too many domains and I might need to pick a good one for some of the primary ones that I do not want to lose.
I have heard good things about Cloudflare as a registrar. In-fact, I suggest them to a friend who uses it. However, I user Cloudflare for DNS for most of my domains. SO, I won't move the domains registration to them.
I've been registering domains since 1993 (when dot coms were free!). I use Namecheap almost exclusively now, except for very weird IDN edge cases such as emoji domains that most providers balk on.
Namecheap support seems good, even though they are working out of a warzone.
Netlify does not sell you DNS, it allows you to delegate your own zone to be handled by their servers. You can always log into your registrar and switch it back.
That said, you’d need to copy all the records you had set
so basically what we have is a broken software update that Netlify won’t look at because they point and say there is no SLA for free tiers
so we can blame the initial thing on incompetence over malice, but then the second thing over incompetent malice because some support staffer can’t act like a human with empathy
Apparently (according to a post in the link) the following is from their “Sales Team”: Unsure if this is true, if so, WTF?
—-
“Pro” and “Business” are both self-serve tier plans the support offering there is the same.
Currently the support offering is email support with no guaranteed response time.
Our self-serve tier is for prototyping, hobbyist or smaller projects and therefore we don’t expect projects with urgent needs or requirements that go beyond self-serve on our self-serve tier. Our enterprise plans are suited for for projects that require more timely responses and more specific attention.
It's unfortunately very true, both quotes are from the same email chain in October 2021 discussing their support options after experiencing exceptionally slow response times on a paid account.
However for full transparency I copied the quotes from the last time that I raised them, and looking back at the original emails it does seem I'd edited them slightly for clarity. The precise quotes of those lines, copied & pasted from the email, including the "for for" are:
—- This is largely because of how our plans are engineered. Our self-serve tier is for prototyping, hobbyist or smaller projects and therefore we don't expect projects with urgent needs or requirements that go beyond self-serve on our self-serve tier. Our enterprise plans are suited for for projects that require more timely responses and more specific attention.
—- 1. Because “Pro” and “Business” are both self-serve tier plans the support offering there is the same, so that would be correct. Currently the support offering is email support with no guaranteed response time
Ultimately all we were seeking was information on if they had a support option with a faster average turnaround than several days, not specifically an SLA, just a better average for "Business" accounts.
The response in both emails touted their Enterprise plan as the only option, and quoted us as:
—- $2,000 is the starting price of our enterprise plans, and that can be priority support or combined with another SKU (HP Edge, HP Build).
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[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 207 ms ] threadTo be clear, i'm not against best-effort support and that's actually what i use and provide year long (i never sign SLAs). I'm just saying it's scammy to call a plan without SLA "pro". Things can go wrong and things will go wrong, but when you can't have an actual human acknowledging your problem in the next few work hours, that's certainly not what i would call "pro" service.
Or worse, trying to turn it into a sales call. Every time I've talked to Comcast (Xfinity) lately about my internet not working, they've tried to sell me phone service. Very frustrating. I'm calling you about a product that doesn't work; what makes you think I'm interested in _another_ product from you at this time? Maybe reserve the upsell until _after_ the problem is resolved? /rant
Name a few please. Should support own domains and automatic SSL certificates. I'm fine with uploading HTML files manually.
Otherwise, there's the usual bunch of non-profit hosts: the tilde servers (sdf & friends), the hosting coops from libreho.st or chatons.org federations, as well as the radical hosts for more political content (blackblogs, noblogs, etc).
Shoutout to neocities.org if user-friendly, retro-style websites are your thing.
As for other services i've mentioned, they're not "free" either. They're usually free price (donation based) or ask for a fixed membership fee. Running things has a cost, but by going with a non-profit host you usually have better durability. sdf.org or marsnet.org have been running for over 20 years, can you say the same about any free offering by a startup ?
Maybe you mean VC?
Because almost all hosting is for-profit.
Seems a little dark, considering that's almost every company on the planet.
There are two arms to it inth ecase of hosting:
1. Not putting your eggs in one basket: have a tested backup/DR plan so if a host goes bad you can move easily.
2. Always remember that they have a bottom line, and it is more important to them than your bottom line. Any claim otherwise should be viewed with suspicion. Also if you are on a free (or just very cheap) tier you will be a lot less important than customers on higher tiers.
Like, "never trust a stranger" is dark because most people are strangers? It's not.
What makes them a “needlessly-shady entity”?
Doubt.
But open to examples. However I suspect they'll all be subject to ifs and buts and paper cuts.
I've worked with small providers who don't provide an SLA on support for a $9 tier, and I've worked with large providers with a 2 hour SLA - I can't say that the 2 hour SLA is alway better.
That said, if you rely on something it's incredibly naive to use a free tier and then feel indignant on a forum when you can't immediately get a response.
If a person pays for a thing they are more invested in making it something worthwhile and thus less attacks.
If something is free and any issue, it suddenly is horrible because they never associated value with it from the beginning.
It is a psychological thing and plays into many parts of the market.
Not only that. I would buy paid app only if convinced that it is worth it. I am willing to try free app - and in case that it is garbage, rate it accordingly.
Also, free versions often have strong limitation or massive amounts of ads: so they are worse than paid one.
There’s self selection, if you pay for something then it you’re more selective in what you get. “Free” apps are also worse due to inserting advertising.
I believe, based on other comments I have seen on HN, that my view is a pretty widespread one.
That may be a partial explanation, but I've also heard this frequently from people who sell to only retail customers.
If you're the low cost plumber, pressure washer, or lawn care, you're going to have a headache compared to the people who operate up market.
Incidentally, I remembered his name recently and looked him up. I found an interview where he sold his company for "8 figures" and talked about the joy of "nurturing a team." Not sure the lesson there, but I found it funny.
We were the best deal in town (lowest price and user:line ratio for an unlimited service), so they would usually change their tune, but we had a 2-strike policy, so call and be rude again, and you're out for good.
We didn't end up having to do this that many times, but when we did, it was worth it.
Often your most difficult and abusive customers end up being your least profitable.
There's a saying I like to use: I'll bend over backwards to help you, but I won't bend over forwards.
The real problem is usually the small group of customers who are consistently abusive and excessively demanding and will fly off the handle every other week over some small thing.
Problem is I have a short fuse for disrespect, I just don't have the time to tolerate it.
Where are you getting the idea that they are locked out of support and not their main account, like they are saying in the linked thread?
Not to this specific case, it is not as you imply a case of a single person having a problem and not having timely support, it is a widespread problem or policy somewhere (purposeful or accidental) that collectively harmed many free-tier users.
I don't see how this is any different?
He wasn't harmed in the sense that netlify drove to his house and stabbed him. He lost access to a free food platter.
If people are planning their near future based on what you've said you would likely be giving them, then at some point there is probably some inherited responsibility to at least give the user of that service a heads up so they can make other plans if possible.
If you’re not paying for it you’re not owed anything. Someone was doing you a favour at their expense and then they stopped. If you want something you can rely on pay for it.
While with Netlify the person is back at exactly where they started before Netlify was hosting w/e their project was. So they're in the same neighborhood with the same battery level as they started with.
The free tier is very clearly not for professional work so its really more like if your buddy said they could pick you up but they won't move a couch for you and you showed up with a couch and they just left.
Hmm, moving to a free service can take a lot of time, there might be lock-in?
I don't have specific experience of netlify.
I stayed with my hosting provider despite them doubling my costs just because it would take a long time to find another trustable provider with the offering I need and then a lot of time to move and make sure everything is working.
If it's just a white label service then yes, easy to switch back. If it's not directly comparable then integration costs (in time) can mean you've been "dumped in the road half way there".
Of course if the driver tells you directly "I might have to drop you half way" then that's fine.
It's hard to express how benign most of this is and I'm not trying to oversell the damages, but there is potential for it to be bad and thus at some point there's a responsibility to your users (that champion your product and give you indirect value) to do at least the bare minimum of giving them an email or something.
It certainly takes less time for netlify to send an email than it does for their users to change platforms.
In either case, they fixed the problem, but the expectation of immediate support on a free account is silly.
Which is why it's good to pay for the product to get support once you're dependent on it. It's why cloud providers give companies and devs free credit. Once you've built it on that platform, you're less likely to want to move, and might need to scale, and get support once you're making money. This is how free tiers work, they're basically a demo, and they can cancel accounts for abuse or get around to fixing problems if and when they feel like it. You're also welcome to find another service...that's free, that provides great support and hope they stick around.
Going back to the free sample analogy, you can get one for free, but if you want the full product (including support), you gotta pay.
"pay" is inaccurate. "Consideration" is the word you are looking for. It's silly to think otherwise.
Those are not people who need support. They were locked out with no warning and no explanation.
Netlify's own EULA states (https://www.netlify.com/pdf/self-serve-subscription-agreemen...):
> While we always make an effort to communicate clearly and well in advance if we decide a particular website project is not a good fit for our Free Usage Tier, we reserve the right to disable or remove any website project on Netlify’s Free Usage Tier without notice at our sole discretion
so every free user should very much expect "an effort to communicate clearly and well in advance". They were explicitly told they should.
"we reserve the right to disable or remove any website project on Netlify’s Free Usage Tier without notice at our sole discretion"
That's the promise. Full stop. Everything else is filler words to make that seem more palatable to people.
You are being misled because you are not reading the contract as "a list of things netlify MUST do". Making assumptions based on anything else is folly - you are trusting a commercial entity to be "nice" and that's a really, really bad thing to trust them to do.
I got locked out of the Vercel dashboard for a couple weeks due to a bug. For a $20/user/month paid account, mind you. This support thread feels similar, though unlike what happened to me with Vercel, it appears to be deliberate on Netlify's part.
Cloudflare seems more reliable but https://www.politico.eu/article/sap-cloudflare-enable-russia...
Just because you don't exchange money doesn't mean nothing of value is being exchanged. Netlify does owe people certain things for that exchange. "Nothing" is absolutely and factually false.
Free/Charity food is exempt from safe food policies in many jurisdictions.
That's why so many homeless avoid the local soup kitchens, as they consistently give them food poisoning.
These people aren’t being indignant, just frustrated. You can’t criticize them for expecting help from a support forum either, since apparently that’s the only place where Netlify expects free users to get support.
The headline is exactly correct. There is no editorialising at all.
Additionally, they're not locked out of support, but out of the actual accounts.
I got hit with a random suspension 4-6 months ago. Nothing important there, it was a personal test site and it was a free account. I think there was an option to appeal. Tried that but did not hear back from them. So I just dropped it.
They might have become more aggressive now for what ever reason.
One reason I am trying to shift back to bare metal servers. I had problems with almost all cloud providers(mostly sudden bills with crazy amounts. Plus a lot of them being a nightmare to move off of.). Bare metal is cheaper to run once you get it operational. But takes longer to setup and manage till you get it automated.
Where do you get bare metal server + colo + transfer that's under $19/mth over the typical lifespan? Let's say 5 years, so $1140 in total?
FYI, with dedicated servers you don’t pay for colo separately. It’s included in the monthly fee. Bandwidth also, although on low end plans bandwidth might be limited or metered above some threshold.
Where does co-location and transfer come from when someone says bare metal.
Parent was not happy with cloud providers. Tbh, I see the low end bare metal boxes with automatic provisioning as just another cloud provider. It's just not VMs. Apart from noisy neighbours, you end up with mostly the same types of issues.
There are a few providers offering cheap dedicated servers at that range, OVH's budget lines are popular (though often sold out for that reason): $11/mo for a machine with 2T storage, $17 for 2x2T so you can RAID them for safety, and a bit over your budget one with 3x2T or a pair of 480G SSDs.
But you generally get an ancient CPU, limited bandwidth, and old drives (so I do recommend RAID if you get a machine with more than one drive), with that sort of offer, so if very much depends on what you want to use the resource far. The cheapest machines I mentioned above are Atom N8200s, the next few up old Xeon E3 models, all their budget line are limited to 100mbit, and so on. Depending on your use case this may be a great compromise for guaranteed performance (unlike with a VPS where you may have very noisy neighbours) or if storage is far more important to your application than processing umpf. Of course for other cases it might be a terrible compromise: for many applications the potential to burst CPU use to much more than those Atoms can give you, and/or burst network throughput significantly over 100mbit, will make a VPS with less storage and less performance stability far more attractive. Also a good VPS provider will have good storage redundancy so you don't have to worry about RAID & related (though still, do keep off-provider backups in case of provider failure).
[only picking OVH because I have experience using a couple of their machines, there are other companies with not dissimilar offers]
Another factor is that with there being far fewer budget server providers compared to VPS providers, you might not get a cheap machine in your preferred location. If most of your customer base is in Asia then a server in France or Canada might not be suitable, or if your use case involves holding PII you might need something in your home country to simplify legal matters in that area.
> > Bare metal is cheaper to run
Though that isn't true for all use cases. Maybe not most. For very small workloads, for instance, cloud often wins on both cost and convenience. For larger or less predictable ones though, VPSs and dedicated servers can be better value and more predictable performance and cost (at the expense of some of that convenience). Different jobs, different tools.
Wonder if suspended users have a way to transfer their domains to a different registrar.
It seems one should use a registrar whose primary business is selling domains, and host their content elsewhere.
I read both the title and your comment as "Netflix", and I was surprised at their mission creep.
Sorry if this is a bit off topic.
DNS is taken care by Cloudflare (this can also be by AWS Route53).
Emails, hosts, and others can be with Google, Proton, Fastmail, AWS, et al.
I have heard (know two founders) and I had experienced that domain grabbing-on-search with Godaddy! I won't go anywhere near them.
DirectNIC. Based on Louisiana. Very professional. Been around forever.
Not the cheapest registrar, which is a feature, not a bug.
If your registrar is competing based on nothing but cost, it has to make up the money by cutting elsewhere.
I have heard good things about Cloudflare as a registrar. In-fact, I suggest them to a friend who uses it. However, I user Cloudflare for DNS for most of my domains. SO, I won't move the domains registration to them.
I've been quite happy with Porkbun so far!
Namecheap support seems good, even though they are working out of a warzone.
That said, you’d need to copy all the records you had set
I might migrate my site to my own VPS this weekend, just to be safe.
so we can blame the initial thing on incompetence over malice, but then the second thing over incompetent malice because some support staffer can’t act like a human with empathy
—- “Pro” and “Business” are both self-serve tier plans the support offering there is the same. Currently the support offering is email support with no guaranteed response time. Our self-serve tier is for prototyping, hobbyist or smaller projects and therefore we don’t expect projects with urgent needs or requirements that go beyond self-serve on our self-serve tier. Our enterprise plans are suited for for projects that require more timely responses and more specific attention.
However for full transparency I copied the quotes from the last time that I raised them, and looking back at the original emails it does seem I'd edited them slightly for clarity. The precise quotes of those lines, copied & pasted from the email, including the "for for" are:
—- This is largely because of how our plans are engineered. Our self-serve tier is for prototyping, hobbyist or smaller projects and therefore we don't expect projects with urgent needs or requirements that go beyond self-serve on our self-serve tier. Our enterprise plans are suited for for projects that require more timely responses and more specific attention.
—- 1. Because “Pro” and “Business” are both self-serve tier plans the support offering there is the same, so that would be correct. Currently the support offering is email support with no guaranteed response time
Ultimately all we were seeking was information on if they had a support option with a faster average turnaround than several days, not specifically an SLA, just a better average for "Business" accounts.
The response in both emails touted their Enterprise plan as the only option, and quoted us as:
—- $2,000 is the starting price of our enterprise plans, and that can be priority support or combined with another SKU (HP Edge, HP Build).