Review Time
Full disclosure: I currently work at Alibaba Cloud. That said, this review contains *only* my personal opinion.First things first: there are two "Alibaba Cloud"s out there. The first is aliyun.com, the second is alibabacloud.com.aliyun.com is Alibaba Cloud's domestic site: users sign up with domestic Chinese phone numbers, pay in Chinese RMB, and the site is available in Chinese only (the console however does support English, for some products). It's intended for Chinese users. This site boasts 200+ products and services, phone and chat support at nearly any time of day, and a thriving developer forum. This Alibaba Cloud holds a 46% market share in the Mainland Chinese market, more than the next 4 or 5 providers combined. It is a mature service that has been operating since 2009 and it is a respected brand inside China.I don't work for that Alibaba Cloud, and chances are most reviewers here have not used it. Instead, they have used alibabacloud.com. This is Alibaba Cloud's International entity, which takes payment in USD and allows sign up using non-domestic-Chinese information (foreign phone numbers and bank accounts). This is a new, young offshoot of the domestic Alibaba Cloud and is still not at the level of maturity foreign users are used to from AWS, Azure, or GCP. It's trying hard to get there, though.alibabacloud.com doesn't offer all the services aliyun.com does, but it offers all of the basics you need to build a highly available web application, such as CDN, object storage (OSS), server load balancers (SLB), and a managed database service (RDS). Most of these core services map nicely onto AWS, so it's easy to get started if you are an experienced AWS user.I use alibabacloud.com every day as part of my day-to-day work and although there are occasional frustrations getting things to work with 3rd party tools like terraform, I trust the platform and have not experienced any failures or nasty unexpected behaviors. Judging from the reviews here, one big issue people are having is with the billing system. It's true that the way we handle subscriptions is not intuitive and needs some work. What I typically recommend to customers is to *always* choose Pay-As-You-Go when starting out, then switch to subscription later, once you are sure you know what you want. This will avoid issues around buying a subscription in the wrong region, or buying the wrong instance specification and then being unable to change.Also, if you are a new user who is using coupons for the first time, pay close attention to the *final* price listed in the lower right hand corner of the checkout page. This is the price you will pay *after* coupons are applied. Some people miss that, and end up with a surprise bill. If that number is not "$0.00", you are going to be charged. Hope this review helps some newcomers!
DO NOT WASTE YOUR TIME!They lure you in with cheap pricing but so far I wasted an entire day of productivity on trying to port my site and - yep, still not working.A day of my productive time outweighs the cost savings dramatically. My advice is do not waste your time with this service - they have no idea what they are doing and you will kill yourself through the stress of it.
Appalling support and serviceLet me describe exactly what they did to me:- I stand to pay a certain amount for the month of Dec. 2018, for the pay-as-you-go service. - I have a grand total of 5 instances with them, plus some elastic IPs and an SLB.- So, come January 1-st 2019, they issue the invoice.- I pay my invoice on January 3-rd 2019, because they LITERALLY stopped all my instances, and there was no way for me to restart them.- So... the net due payment for their bills, apparently is.... non existent. They lock you out immediately.BUT...That is somewhat understandable for a small company, that doesn't have any liquidity.Now... the worst part is yet to come.As I was paying my Dec 2018 bill, I decided: Oh let me update my payment method, because for some reason, my (otherwise valid) credit card had failed before, on the 1-st of Jan.And now, on Jan 3-rd, I decided to use PayPal instead, and avoid any bank related issues on the failed payments.SO it seems that Alibaba Cloud will charge $50 every 2 days (I have proof of that), when you change your payment method.They have charged my paypal account three times (a total of $150), JUST for changing my payment method.THEN, like all that wasn't bad enough, they came back saying my Dec bill was unpaid ! And that they will turn my servers off ONCE AGAIN. (Again: I have proof to back all this up).So when I go into my billing area again, I see there is a $0 UNPAID balance, that comes from some $630 December Balance, that was previously paid.BUT, when I contact support, they say: You have unpaid bills, and they pointed me to a page where there was a some $290 bill, that was actually for the month of January (and NOT December).And when I tried to pay that (as pointless as it seemed to do that though), the system kept taking me back to the $0 unpaid balance page.And their support always came back with the same response:"You have unpaid bills."Never giving any details, never even having the common sense, to look over the attached payments that I have made, it was like they really did not care AT ALL about the service they were providing, and just wanted users to register their payment method, so that they could charge the users no matter what.I hope this helps THEM in the first place, to better their service and support, and then, most importantly I hope it helps others, who are under the pressure or other reasons to purchase their services.
I would give it a 0 star. Absolutely lousy, and worse, a thief that deduct money from your credit card and refuse to reverse it after complaint lodged in the rawest form - still pretend that they do not understand the problem. A company that does not take the concern of the client as a top priority is not a company that you can trust with. Not with your data. Who knows what will happen when things go wrong?I signed in to Alibaba Cloud because they were promoting a free trial. My intention was to evaluate it as I was concurrently working with Google Cloud Platform also. I tried out a few things, amongst them probably some kind of elastic memory. I found the services provided barebone (no analytics, no GPU). The console is terrible, so hard to navigate. The information is scattered all over the place. Jagons used at free will. I therefore stopped the CPU and wrote a ticket to ask that my account be deleted and all my credit card information withdrawn. I did that because the console refused to allow me to delete my account, even though I followed through a crappy list of instructions. That was 12 March 2018. And when I checked my credit card bill on 4 Jun 2018, I realised that I was charged a couple hundred of dollars. When I opened a ticket to ask for reversal, the reply skirted over my obvious request of "FULL REVERSAL OF PAYMENT" and start to give me this link and that link to follow through the deletion of account. Obviously, the interest of the client is not a priority of this company. No one should trust their data to such an untrustworthy company that does not bear the interest of their interest in their business ethics. Be warned, it is this bad.
Issue this review involved with:Order # 500353401350832Ticket No. : 851GAZBEWorst company ever. Better use Godaddy, Namecheap, Siteground, Rackspace. Alibaba Cloud support level extremely worst. Even if you have paid successfully for something they will ask for your passport, name, credit, will inquiry balance information. and loads of other personal stuff. Just for only $22. SIck support level. But Wait, my identity already has been verified even my profile saying that. Then, is wt* again getting them for? I am going through this sickness right now. I have migrated several domains and now facing their worst level of support. They are sending the same generic message. After I provided the documents and they are just saying 2 different things every time. One time they saying, Congratulation. You made the purchase successfully. Then again saying you haven't, you still have to reopen your account. Lol, If my account was closed or limited I would have received an email regarding this or would see closed access. But no, neither of them is happening and I can access them. I don't think they have any level of experience of providing the support. I don't even know who works behind the chair. But they have labeled as "SUPPORT ENGINEER". Unexperienced people. First, teaches them by providing support classes before adding them to the real job. I don't think it's "Mr. Jack Ma's doing. But people who are at the sub-management level are just crap.I am a programmer and Will never suggest this service to any business or to any of my clients.
Service used: DomainsI bought domain from them, as they have sometimes few dollars cheaper options. Everything was fine till I had an issue with changing my profile settings. To get support from them, you have to issue a ticket. They have Critical type and Low type. Critical ticket - they respond <15 minutes. Low tickets - they respond within 48 hours. Critical tickets - you have to purchase which costs about 50$ for 2 tickets. They give you 2 Low tickets. I could wait for 48 hours, so I logged a ticket. The support engineer didn't understand my question, so he asked me to clarify, I clarified. What I got next really got at ME. "For better tickets management, ask 1 question in 1 ticket. Submit new ticket. "Their domains cost few dollars cheaper but when you need their help, they will charge 5 times the domain price. CHINESE SERVICE - YOU BUY SUPPORT TICKET PLAN WITH THEM.
I had to jump through hoops to open an account, and I then spent an entire week setting up my instances then all of a sudden the terminated all of them! And they gave me no reason!Absolute joke of a cloud service, that's the quality of a Chinese service for you!Best to stick with Amazon or Microsoft!
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