Why the “Digital Ocean killed my company” incident scares the hell out of me • Hacker News Board

Re: Why the “Digital Ocean killed my company” incident scares the hell out of me

#161

Post by bcooks » Fri, Jun 07, 2019, 4:00 AM UTC

weaksauce wrote: post #153

bcooks wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi weaksauce... sorry I must have missed your earlier question. The account had been live for some time and in that sense had history but because of credits it didn't have payment history. As some others have commented lots of startups use credits to get their business going and depending on your usage they can last you for quite a while. Payment history indicates a willingness and capability to make payments. Part o…

I appreciate the response. a followup question to that would be how they got enough credits to be running for that long without any payment?

DO has a startup program called Hatch: https://www.digitalocean.com/hatch/

That is the starting place for many folks.

Re: Why the “Digital Ocean killed my company” incident scares the hell out of me

#162

Post by freehunter » Fri, Jun 07, 2019, 4:10 AM UTC

bcooks wrote: post #161

weaksauce wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I appreciate the response. a followup question to that would be how they got enough credits to be running for that long without any payment?

DO has a startup program called Hatch: https://www.digitalocean.com/hatch/ That is the starting place for many folks.

So a startup was getting their hosting entirely for free, their paying customers were Fortune 500 companies, but they didn't have the money to pay for off-site backups.

What the hell was their cost then?

Re: Why the “Digital Ocean killed my company” incident scares the hell out of me

#163

Post by bcooks » Fri, Jun 07, 2019, 4:10 AM UTC

cyberferret wrote: post #132

What scares me the most these days is that a lot of vendors have a policy of "we're shutting you down, but we won't tell you why or how you can fix things so that it doesn't happen again". I have had friends who have had their Twitter or Youtube accounts shut down with no explanation from the companies involved. Just recently, MailChimp shut down a brand new account for my SaaS (we had only 4 subscribers added, and h…

Hi cyberferret. Two quick trys to provide some clarity for you here:

1. On your vendors don't say why they took action point. I think a lot of vendors, us included, worry about the bad actors knowing the _how_ of our algorithms because they will then have intelligence on what to try and work around to avoid detection. It's a constant adversarial chess match we adjust, they adjust.

2. As for the human element being needed for the after effects I totally agree. That said, I looked at our numbers and while many of the nefarious actors simply move to the next thing, a very large percentage of the, "WTF" replies are actually from bad actors hoping that is enough to be re-enabled and to keep going for a while. Our goal is to bring more people into the after effects and give them better information to make decisions and work with customers to avoid this kind of mess in the future.

Re: Why the “Digital Ocean killed my company” incident scares the hell out of me

#164

Post by freehunter » Fri, Jun 07, 2019, 4:12 AM UTC

TheSpiciestDev wrote: post #122

All this Digital Ocean talk... I spun up some droplets to play with a few months ago and liked what I saw and then "deactivated" them or turned them off. What I did not expect to see a few days ago was the bill for the stopped droplets. Not just a little for the dormant disks I have had but seemingly full-prices for the entire droplets, as if they were all still "active". Nonetheless I deleted all my droplets, discar…

I just tried to turn off one of my droplets and had to click "okay" on a message that said "You will still be billed for Droplets that are turned off because your disk space, CPU, RAM, and IP address will still be reserved."

If you clicked okay without actually reading the message, that is entirely your own fault.

Re: Why the “Digital Ocean killed my company” incident scares the hell out of me

#165

Post by freehunter » Fri, Jun 07, 2019, 4:13 AM UTC

ksec wrote: post #140

I think Scaleway and UpCloud are two biggest contender to DO. ( Not sure why Linode is not getting traction, may be its security incidents )

Before I moved to DO I used Linode. My day job is a security consultant, I switched from Linode because of their repeated security incidents.

Re: Why the “Digital Ocean killed my company” incident scares the hell out of me

#166

Post by geezerjay » Fri, Jun 07, 2019, 4:48 AM UTC

phonon wrote: post #74

barkingcat wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because DO has their $5 and $10 / month plan, and that's really enough for me.

https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/pricing/?opdp1=pricing ?

AWS Lightsail charges $3.50/month for a vm with 512MB RAM.

Hetzer charges €3.00/month for avm with 2GB RAM.

Re: Why the “Digital Ocean killed my company” incident scares the hell out of me

#167

Post by luckylion » Fri, Jun 07, 2019, 5:27 AM UTC

marcosdumay wrote: post #138

luckylion wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also, why would they want to? One of these days, they'll fuck up big time for many customers and get sued. They'll survive, but it'll cost a lot of money. Especially for Google (and other life-or-death services for many people), the solution seems kind of simple: charge for support. Google terminated your GMail-Account because you logged in from Turkey? Pay $50 to get somebody to listen to your story and work with…

> Pay $50 to get somebody to listen to your story and work with you on proving your identity. Personally, I would understand this as extortion.

If they did it willfully, sure. But even then, I'd still prefer paying them $50 then losing access to basically everything.

Re: Why the “Digital Ocean killed my company” incident scares the hell out of me

#168

Post by yardstick » Fri, Jun 07, 2019, 5:45 AM UTC

dathinab wrote: post #78

yardstick wrote: post #61

I’ve asked this in a previous thread but didn’t get much of an answer: what can a business do to proactively fend off issues with cloud providers shutting them down. I’ve heard GCP (or was it AWS?) is less likely to shut you down if you bill on account vs using a credit card. Are there any other things we can do to reduce problems? Would asking for an account manager help? Would buying reserved instances help? Is the…

- Use billing methods which are less likely to be used by scammers (e.g. likely not credit card). - Keep a steady balance. - Have luck (sad but true). Minimum spend and similar might help with customer service (if they can see your spend). But most problems start with automated services. Don't switch cloud providers every half year because another one is slightly cheaper now (i.e. have longer running/existing account…

Some good advice, thanks

Re: Why the “Digital Ocean killed my company” incident scares the hell out of me

#169

Post by dvfjsdhgfv » Fri, Jun 07, 2019, 6:40 AM UTC

Someone1234 wrote: post #31

jwr wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But I still do business with DO because it costs ~half the price of a comparable EC2 instance I'm curious why people who don't have massive scaling and variability issues choose DO or AWS for their hosting. For 34€/month, Hetzner will rent you a physical server (i7-6700, 64GB RAM, 2x512GB SSD, 1Gbit/s networking). That's a monster of a machine and can run most sites out there. And if you need more oomph and better…

Because hypothetically your instance should be hardware agnostic. If the physical hardware dies, it should automatically migrate to another physical server at their data center without your intervention. It will only look like an unexpected restart from your perspective. That's something worth paying for. It would be more comparable to two servers at Hetzner with rapid failover. But even that is more involved since y…

I have several servers with Hetzner, including a failover setup. In the last 7 years I needed to use it 2-3 times for a very short time, maybe 2-3 hours. The worst accident was when two hard drivers and the controller failed at once. Still no problem rebuilding the array and get the old system running. So practically speaking, when you look at outages Google or Microsoft has, for me the total uptime over the years is comparable.

Re: Why the “Digital Ocean killed my company” incident scares the hell out of me

#170

Post by cyberferret » Fri, Jun 07, 2019, 6:47 AM UTC

bcooks wrote: post #163

cyberferret wrote: post #132

What scares me the most these days is that a lot of vendors have a policy of "we're shutting you down, but we won't tell you why or how you can fix things so that it doesn't happen again". I have had friends who have had their Twitter or Youtube accounts shut down with no explanation from the companies involved. Just recently, MailChimp shut down a brand new account for my SaaS (we had only 4 subscribers added, and h…

Hi cyberferret. Two quick trys to provide some clarity for you here: 1. On your vendors don't say why they took action point. I think a lot of vendors, us included, worry about the bad actors knowing the _how_ of our algorithms because they will then have intelligence on what to try and work around to avoid detection. It's a constant adversarial chess match we adjust, they adjust. 2. As for the human element being ne…

I appreciate you giving an insight into the reasons behind your decisions Barry - I've learned a bit here myself, and can relate to the quandary that you must have to tiptoe around, in between being open and communicative, versus keeping your cards close to your chest. Thanks, and best of luck.