When Russian service is better than American, or the battle of humanities with evil calculators

Somehow I took it into my head to find out who the clouds are cloudier. And since I am a humanist, and it ruined my life I didn’t have any preparation for server administration, I began to compare as much as I could - for the price.

At first - he himself climbed the sites of various cloud providers, searched for price lists, used calculators. Everything was fine until it reached AWS and Azure. It was on these calculators that I broke down.
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The Amazon simple monthly calculator in two accounts proved to me that it was me - from the category of the simplest, and in general an infusoria in shoes. And the attempt to calculate how much Azure will cost , showed such huge numbers that I was immediately stunned and lost faith in my own mental abilities.

So I came to the logical thought that if you yourself can not - ask someone who is smarter. And I started over. Chose a single config, as a reference meter , so that no one was hurt. I drove 20 pieces of companies involved in the clouds - and addressed them with the same request: "And help me, wretched, calculate this config and tell me how much it will cost, in one digit."

He first wrote to several Ukrainian companies. Then, under the influence of Habr, Krok (I like how and what people write about) wrote them too . Yes, now a politically-difficult situation, but I decided that it would not hurt. And, as it turned out - not lost. That Krokʻovtsy answered me faster and better than all. On the same day, their representatives contacted me, asked only a couple of questions - and they issued a well-defined offer. The answers were clear, correct, readable, I can only applaud the guys.

In terms of coolness and clarity, they lost only to Rackray, but maybe I just don't like minimalism, subjectively. And so - in general, well done, answered quickly, simply, and even in 3 options. With a little less comfort and delay, several Ukrainian and Baltic companies responded, but I can’t say anything about them. It feels like it is just because nothing is hooked and not remembered. But one Ukrainian company remembered very well, which at first requested to fill in a rather large questionnaire, to indicate the contacts of several decision makers. She then finished off at all, demanding to specify the EDRPOU (OGRN), without which she refused to consider anything.

Poles were worse. Some mailer mail.ru - generally categorically considered spam, others - letters sent to info @, sales @ and support @ were simply ignored. I got through to them only by filling out a claim form, almost with mats.

But there were those with whom even this did not help. It was Microsoft that broke all the scoring patterns on clients. If Amazon did manage to get responding, even filling out an inconceivable number of forms, writing wherever possible, and ditching for almost three weeks, then this focus did not work with Azure.

It all started with the fact that I filled out the contact form on the portal vindoblak , with a request to write me a contact soap. No reaction followed, so I wrote again. Once again. And further. Then Stirlitz suspected something was wrong, he called the representative office. It took 10 minutes to dial up the music and another 5 minutes to switch between departments. After that, it turned out that Ukraine has Office 365, but there is no support for Azure, and they cannot help in any way, go to ... fill out the form on the portal. My objection, they say, “Floated, we know!” - these comrades ignored. A week later he called again, but with the same result.

It was a shame, but I decided to try again. I registered in Azuroblack, found a local LiveChat and wrote to a consultant (judging by the name - Hindu, not a bot) that I want to be called back. He gave a direct number, two or three times said “call me ASAP” in different variations, he promised, disconnected and ... everything. Really - everything. No one contacted. At all.

I filled out the form a couple of times, wrote on Russian.Comm @, but the result was a bit predictable. It was somewhat surprising that calling the number 8-800 ... turned out to be physically impossible: it constantly answered that the number was dialed incorrectly.

In the end, I spat, filled an extremely negative feedback form - and ... again, nothing happened. At all. Basically. It’s not that I believed that William Henry Gates’s third drummers were their clients, but the feeling was still not pleasant. Rather, however, as in the joke about a pimply, chirped girl, they, employees, were too lazy to go beyond the minimum necessary.



To be honest, I used to live in the belief that the American service is a smile-and-kiss, and the Russian is always a scoop. But communication with the guys from Microsoft and Krok - greatly influenced my worldview. I am sure that there are different people in each company, and everything is not so simple. But I also have the HAC-obvious experience, which says that a Russian company can provide service for 5+, and an American one can establish out of the blue.

However, I do not even much regret that I spent a lot of my time on these experiments. I hope my experience will be useful to those who are seduced by high-profile brands or who think what to do with their hardware. Or someone else.

All good!