My company used to use a hosting provider that was basically AWS plus some extra guarantees. We just finished migrating onto regular AWS because they now offer what we need directly.

Then they took no personal responsibility. That definitely damaged their reputation. Here, they are taking at least some responsibility. Props to them on improving.

Also, GCP does indeed have serious reliability issues, and Google does indeed have serious customer support issues.

EDIT: It has been brought to my attention below that the first 2 paragraphs are misattributed, and were not Railway, but rather a customer of theirs. Sorry, Railway!

Microsoft might have technical warts but commercially they are strong and Azure is a lot of times bundled with other services and you know you can get someone on the phone if needed

Google has... ?

For Vercel if your nextjs site can be compiled statically you could probably throw it up on almost anything. We've self hosted before which is pretty straightforward but you lose a lot of the image optimization stuff unless you go deep into setting up open next.

No code lock-in through SDKs and built on top of AWS with great DX for both developer and coding agents

Even if you use AWS and the like, if you aren't building your app with redundancy across multiple AZs, then you'll have some downtime occasionally.

And even if you do build redundancy with multiple AZ, some services might fail anyway as AWS is not entirely isolated. So you might have downtimes.

So just accept downtimes and use the best tool for you (unless they are really bad, like GitHub level bad). If you cannot accept any downtime, you'll have to spend millions of dollars and months of work to have the confidence to expect no downtime. Something like Netflix's chaos monkey and infrastructure would be enough.

But really any service (or even on-site hosting) can have downtime, if that's not acceptable then I suppose building/using a tool that can be distributed between multiple hosts located in different geographical areas is the best option.

As an example, I note that GCP responded within 7 minutes according to their timeline. If you’d been using Cloud Run, that would have reduced downtime by over 7 hours — and there’s a good chance that you never would have gone down in the first place if the unknown trigger event was related to other customer activity or something odd Railway did.

There’s also a complexity factor: note how much complex infrastructure they mentioned having to fix that you wouldn’t need for your own account. That code does useful things, I’m sure, but it’s also a lot of moving parts which a hosting provider needs and you don’t – this outage took everyone down, whereas individual AWS or bare metal users would’ve otherwise been unaffected. There isn’t a global optimum which is the same for everyone but I think developers are prone to wildly over-estimating how much time they save by removing a couple of deployment steps relative to the direct costs and the less obvious costs of working within someone else’s environment.

Azure!

It’s the enterprise cloud with enterprise support. They won’t randomly pull the plug on your account, unlike companies that have a wildly different cultural background:

Google - ad tech (you’re the product)

Amazon - shop front (you’re a comptetitor)

Oracle - lawyers (you’re a future lawsuit for license extortion)

Etc…

They don't, because the allure of effortless scaling is hard to resist: everyone thinks of themselves as the next tech unicorn. And if you actually become an unicorn, you're already too dependent on AWS / Azure / GCP to easily move somewhere else. At best, your strategy is to become "multi-cloud".

I doubt that will happen because none of them want to stop the money-making machine they have! And, if your thought after my comment is that all us techies are making a fuss, so the cloud providers and businesses using them will hear our cries and trigger a backlash...? I doubt that to...because some senior business leaders that i see are bent on listening more to management consultants as opposed to abalance of folks including their own internal experts...but, alas, maybe i'm just having too cynical a day today. :-)

I'd wait for more details before adjudicating.

Google has always acted as if they have no obligations whatsoever to their paying customers.

The resulting action should be you have proper disaster recovery, failover, etc.

Not sure I would trust these folks if this is the conclusion they are coming to from this experience. Any cloud provider can/will do this to you.

Assuming the timestamps are accurate, Google probably started terminating resources while the account was not "suspended" and only completed that after all resources were disabled.

> May 19, 22:19 UTC - Root cause identified: Google Cloud Platform has suspended Railway's production account.

They couldn't have identified the root cause before it happened.

* A Google employee messes up a setting (like one of the previous incidents) triggers something that looks like a suspension is warranted and it takes 10 minutes to flow through the process to suspend.

* A Railway customer does something corrupt, or seemingly corrupt, Google's system starts limiting access and take 10 minutes to decide it should be a suspension.

These are even more likely if there is a person in the loop to approve, who obvious did not dig deep enough to see that they should not have done so.

After about 8 hours, a random Google support tech said it was because we were mining bitcoin, which was laughably untrue. We had CPU usage graphs and logs for the whole time and there was no spike. At around 12 hours, they turned it back on, said it was "misconfiguration of our abuse detection" and gave us like $100 in credit.

Absurd. Say what you will about AWS, they would never do that to a customer without a rep reaching out to you first. I have not trusted GCP since.

The moment GCP shut off without any forewarning, its done deal, no need to ask any further questions.

Alternative to Fly or Heroku

Here is my source code Run it on the cloud for me I do not care how

In this case it looks like they also bundle together a bunch of the other services you would need to get code onto the platform, monitor it once it’s there and so on

They said they are already using Gemini 3.5 Pro internally.

It sounds exactly like what I have experienced in terms of Google quality over the decades.

Google has an extremely poor reputation. Why are you thinking differently to that?

Please, someone that worked at Google, please comment.