Comment on Just got charged for reading it

letsgo@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

• GreenKnight23@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  I would be the shithead that would rotate from room to room daily just to fuck their billing up.

  company I worked for had a customer that did this with virtual machines. every single week they would request their VMs from last week to be decommissioned and new ones to be built in their place. not bad if there’s only five or six. they had this done to over 300 VMs. we accepted for two years, the length of the contract and then promptly dropped them, hard.

  the collective backlash caused the company to go bankrupt. they attempted to sue but our lawyers had already created enough documentation to prove we had successfully executed the contract the best of our abilities and had decided to not renew based on high operational costs attributed to the high maintenance requirement of their account and recommended they seek help from a larger competitive service.

  the chaos they put operations through was horrible but was only part of the hell they unleashed. we had to dedicate a billing representative to their account because they contested every-single-fucking-bill. these calls would drag on for weeks before ending with them agreeing to pay what we were charging them, just before starting up for the next billing cycle.

  point is, just because you’re locked in contract doesn’t mean they’re in control.

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  • Pringles@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    So I’m trying to wrap my head around why they would do this and how that even worked. They would decommission them on Friday and have them rebuilt on Monday? These didn’t have a specific config then I assume? And they did it because they paid per hour the machine existed so it made sense cost wise?

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    • GreenKnight23@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      it doesn’t make sense because it was never supposed to.

      they wanted out of the contract and didn’t want to pay the fees. The contract was large enough that we couldn’t really take the hit to MRR and wouldn’t let them out without the fees. so, they were dicks about it and threatened the CEO with legal action, which is why we forced them into fulfilling the contract to term. they could have left at any time, had they been willing to pay the fees.

      as for the VMs. they were remote consoles used in some financial business. I think they had a VPN from each of their locations that used thin-clients to connect to the VMs somehow. it didn’t matter if their user data was gone since they were all based on a single image that had all the software/configs built-in.

      they paid per machine and storage volume. as long as they didn’t go over their contracted amount or under a threshold then they were in compliance with the contract. it was a mutually beneficial contract in the sense that they needed HA high volume VMs with low storage requirements at a fixed price. we offered that to them with volumetric licensing for Microsoft software at a competitive price. think of them like virtual workspaces.

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  • ayyy@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    If your company was hosting virtual machines and people staring and stopping them caused you headaches, it just seems to me like the company you worked at was absolute trash lol.

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    • GreenKnight23@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      they weren’t just starting and stopping them.

      they were requesting all 300+ to be decommissioned and then a new ticket to recommission new ones.

      I mean, what IT company doesn’t have their problems? at least the people I worked with didn’t have your attitude, so that made it an enriching experience.

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      • ayyy@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

        What the fuck kind of hosting company requires a request ticket to provision and tear down a virtual machine!?!? That’s, like, the whole point of virtualization.

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