If you are literally
in the business of enabling, storing, and protecting production workloads, data, etc.. then catastrophic data loss should be an asbolute last resort.
In both of these instances I am referring to a balance of less than $20.
So for less than $20 (a few weeks late) DO says, welp fuck this customer we are going to terminate all of their resources immediately.
This is what DO and others need to do: Put it in your terms that you will keep racking up charges and then send it to collections. Charge interest, charge fees, do whatever you want. Turn $20 into $40. Why? Because businesses do not give a shit... if it is between losing everything or a slap on the wrist (monetary fee) they will chose the latter every time.
One of my clients had to painstakingly trudge through archive.net to recreate their missing blog posts. How fucking miserable is that? Over a few hundred megabytes of disk that DO could have kept around...
Also, actally make an effort to reach out before doing anything serious. Call phone numbers, email other members on the team to alert them to the issue, etc...
Too many times I have seen some script kiddie throw together a client's WP site and toss it on DO because it is 'so cheap and cool' and yet they forget about everything else: backups, security, managing the box, etc... and inevitably shit will hit the fan.
I was really rootin' for DO in the beginning. I even applied to work there when they were first starting out but did not want to relo to NY. Now I am moving three clients OFF of DO because they are all very unhappy with the level (or lack) of service they've received.