Beware Scaling on AWS in Early Days
AWS decided to bill me mid-month (for more than I utilized I should add) even though the cycle ends on the 31st.
The transaction failed. Instead of contacting me to resolve the issue, AWS completely locked me out of the account. Card is also now locked due to "fraud."
I've been trying to resolve this for a week now (closer to 3 weeks if you include quota-related tickets). It's Friday, and I have a demo with a Fortune 100 company next week. In order to get results for this demo, I need to run a lot of Batch jobs - not great.
I shudder to think about what would happened if this had been a launch with paid customers.
From their perspective, I get that crypto miners probably sign up and cancel their credit cards, but I was just using the cloud as intended. I had multiple tickets related to resource quotas that explained why I was using the cloud.
20 comments
[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 49.9 ms ] thread> The transaction failed.
Why? What would have been different half a month later?
> for more than I utilized I should add
Do you have details?
Would you just spot OP some billing credits to make the account current while sorting out issues ?
While I have a host of projects dependent on AWS and Firebase, I'm always worried about being locked to a vendor. What if a vendor just decides they don't like me, what if I'm not able to migrate...
Why would that happen? Vendor lockin is a real concern, but worrying that AWS will decide they don't like you is not rational.
No vendor wants to earn a reputation of being that hostile to its own customer base, and so unless you are doing something that is likely going to raise eyebrows you'll be fine.
My account had 100% reputation, no billing issues and nothing in my account details was unverifiable.
Then the support rep told me that the account was closed by the system, maybe by mistake, but there was no way to reopen an account so I’d have to signup again and then open a support ticket for that account (I think it was to migrate data, no longer remember).
Annoyed, I try to signup again, open a ticket and the response was:
> We have reviewed your account and have determined that Twilio's services cannot support your account at this time due to one or more of the following:
> 1. Violations of Acceptable Use Policy 2. Violations of Twilio SendGrid Email Policy 3. Accounts with unresolved billing issues 4. Inability to verify provided information
> Thank you for your interest in Twilio SendGrid, best of luck with your future endeavors.
This was from an account with 100% reputation. What I think happened is they were purging low spending accounts. So yes, a company can definitely stop liking you. Gladly I was able to move very quickly to SES.
Big companies also just make mistakes. They can accidentally ban you and not feel like fixing it.
My company recently started to offer premium support for more money, how about that?
"Pay 100$ to receive a response within 12 hours!"
"Pay 500$ to receive a response within an hour!"
More money for you, less frustrating and potentially business-ruining outages for customers.
Last example was comically quick to find by the way.
https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=39317352
Why did it fail?
> AWS decided to bill me mid-month (for more than I utilized I should add) even though the cycle ends on the 31st.
There are specific items that are billed immediately, such as domain registrations.
I remember spending months trying to get Google Cloud to increase a quota while I was forced to turn sign ups off in my product while I waited. I also remember asking Digital Ocean to increase my droplet quota and got a blind yes the next day.
I'm unwilling to invest in building a business on a platform where the lack of customer service can be a blocker.