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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
Where does co-location and transfer come from when someone says bare metal.
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.
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.
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.
That said, you’d need to copy all the records you had set
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.
—- “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).
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
