For a while now, I've been paying Amazon an extra $29.00 per month in hope to get at least perfunctory support if ever needed. Now, I need the most basic thing - remove the SMTP sending limit and create a reverse DNS record for a new IP address - and those $29.00 are accomplishing nothing. I have filed three requests already over several days. I'm just getting canned and inappropriate responses, and it seems nowhere closer to being done. I stand a real risk of not being able to reply to customers if this is not sorted.

I've been happy with Amazon Web Services in general. 99% of the time, it works great – as long as you don't have to interact with anyone. But when you need a human to look at something, it's only happening if your request is so ordinary that it just needs to be rubber-stamped.

I had no trouble, two times in the past, having Amazon process a similar request for new instances. But now, I'm trying to move an existing email server to a new Elastic IP. This appears to be too complex a calculus for the (probably offshored, borderline unpaid) AWS "support" team to process.

This is not just at Amazon. Google; Facebook; Microsoft are known to have no effective support unless you have a direct line to the right people, for which you probably pay $$$$.

And it's not just large companies. Last month, I tried to help SSH.com fix a bug in their mainframe SSH implementation. Couldn't reach a developer. Their "support" kept giving useless, canned responses to their user, while telling me they'll "contact me if necessary" and blowing me off.

It's just frustrating all around. We're probably close to where support can be fully done by AIs. That will likely be an improvement over humans, given how incompetent support is these days. But where will the humans work?


Update – July 16: It took more back-and-forth than I hoped, but the issue with Amazon appears to be resolved. :-)