Google’s free offerings understandably only provide best-effort online support, but that’s not acceptable if you’re actually paying for the product or relying on it to build your own products. Google has revamped its support offering for its developer-oriented cloud products to include enhanced options, but getting the higher-level options isn’t cheap.
Google is now offering three levels of support for its ‘cloud platform’ products, which include App Engine, Compute Engine, Cloud Storage, Cloud SQL and BigQuery. The basic Bronze option (essentially what already existed) is free, which only gets you documentation, access to forums and the ability to complain if you think your bill is wrong.
Silver support allows you to email a support team with a promised response time of four hours, and costs $US150 a month. Gold support allows more detailed queries by phone or email and ups the response time to one hour, but starts at $US400 a month (with an added percentage based on your usage of the products). There’s a mysterious Platinum level as well including direct access to the technical account management team, but that’s something that’s offered to large users — if you don’t have a dedicated Google sales rep, it’s not for you.
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