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Digital Ocean killed my droplets and gives a vague reply

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11–20 of 35 posts

Re: Digital Ocean killed my droplets and gives a vague reply

#11

This is not unique, unfortunately. I have been battling with them for the last two months now and I am in the process of moving everything away from DigitalOcean. Something has changed over there and they have zero tolerance concerning everything. My account was overdue by $10 (after being paid on time for close to 5 years), I asked for a deadline extension of 1 week and it was declined. They have already turned off…

What are popular alternatives these days?

Vultr, you can get your first month free through various referral / promotion links, where your first month’s spend (up to $50-200 depending on the link) is gratis (after you’ve added a legit payment method)

Re: Digital Ocean killed my droplets and gives a vague reply

#12

I actually moved over to Linode because of similar anomalies. I had a container I was running my personal site from. Paid my bill on time every month. Got distracted with work and hadn't updated it in a while. One day I go to check on it and the site is down. Head to DO to restart it... and it is just gone. Like it never existed. Didn't even bother trying to communicate with them I was so angry. Been really happy wit…

I mean, yeah, if you don't pay your bill you should fully expect them to stop providing the service which was being paid for (which includes the storage of the associated data).

Generally it’s not unreasonable to expect a business to care about customer retention… and have them email you before this happens

Re: Digital Ocean killed my droplets and gives a vague reply

#13

This is not unique, unfortunately. I have been battling with them for the last two months now and I am in the process of moving everything away from DigitalOcean. Something has changed over there and they have zero tolerance concerning everything. My account was overdue by $10 (after being paid on time for close to 5 years), I asked for a deadline extension of 1 week and it was declined. They have already turned off…

What are popular alternatives these days?

Get yourself an Oracle cloud freetier. It's free and you can get 2x 1Ram1CPU x86 VM's and any combination of 24Ram4CPU arm64 VM's. There is also a bunch of other resources that you get access to. Be aware of VM reclamation, but it is easy to work around it.

More here: https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/FreeTier/freetier...

Re: Digital Ocean killed my droplets and gives a vague reply

#14

I actually moved over to Linode because of similar anomalies. I had a container I was running my personal site from. Paid my bill on time every month. Got distracted with work and hadn't updated it in a while. One day I go to check on it and the site is down. Head to DO to restart it... and it is just gone. Like it never existed. Didn't even bother trying to communicate with them I was so angry. Been really happy wit…

I mean, yeah, if you don't pay your bill you should fully expect them to stop providing the service which was being paid for (which includes the storage of the associated data).

I would say it depends on how long the bill is not payed. I wouldn't expect them to remove everything when a payment is late for a month, for example. But if not payed for more than 6 months, then it is understandable.

Re: Digital Ocean killed my droplets and gives a vague reply

#15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are popular alternatives these days?

Get yourself an Oracle cloud freetier. It's free and you can get 2x 1Ram1CPU x86 VM's and any combination of 24Ram4CPU arm64 VM's. There is also a bunch of other resources that you get access to. Be aware of VM reclamation, but it is easy to work around it. More here: https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/FreeTier/freetier...

From my experience, it's really hard to create an account and upgrade your account to PAYG. People saying you need that if you want to get the free tier VM because the free tier VM keep out of stock.

I need to email the customer support to make an account and even then to change my account to PAYG account, I need to register the credit card again, they keep rejecting my credit card even though that is the same credit card that I used for my account and the test payment go through.

After that I just give up and go with Hetzner (same you need to email CS) but I can start paying them immediately after the account created.

Re: Digital Ocean killed my droplets and gives a vague reply

#16

I actually moved over to Linode because of similar anomalies. I had a container I was running my personal site from. Paid my bill on time every month. Got distracted with work and hadn't updated it in a while. One day I go to check on it and the site is down. Head to DO to restart it... and it is just gone. Like it never existed. Didn't even bother trying to communicate with them I was so angry. Been really happy wit…

I mean, yeah, if you don't pay your bill you should fully expect them to stop providing the service which was being paid for (which includes the storage of the associated data).

He said he paid his bill on time every month, he just didn't update the site in a while!

Re: Digital Ocean killed my droplets and gives a vague reply

#19

This is not unique, unfortunately. I have been battling with them for the last two months now and I am in the process of moving everything away from DigitalOcean. Something has changed over there and they have zero tolerance concerning everything. My account was overdue by $10 (after being paid on time for close to 5 years), I asked for a deadline extension of 1 week and it was declined. They have already turned off…

What are popular alternatives these days?

I've had a great experience so far with UpCloud. Almost a comparable suite of products to DO and their support team is very responsive.

European based too which helps for some projects (GDPR etc) - though you can spin up instances in all the usual global regions.

https://upcloud.com

Re: Digital Ocean killed my droplets and gives a vague reply

#20
That bites.

At the same time, this is why the concept of "business continuity" exists. If you are running a hobby-level service, it may not be worth the trouble, but for anything where the continued existence of the service truly matters, you should have a plan in place of what to do when (not if) your host blows up and leaves you with nothing. That should include the ability to re-launch the code/database/server/whatever on a new host, and restore the latest data backup to that new host.

I get that planning ahead for such things increases the work to launch a service - but anything short of it means you are not in control of your own destiny.

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