"DigitalOcean Killed Our Company" • Hacker News Board

Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#101

Post by _bxg1 » Fri, May 31, 2019, 8:34 PM UTC

macspoofing wrote: post #89

_bxg1 wrote: post #64

Looks like Moisey Uretsky personally intervened fairly quickly: https://twitter.com/moiseyuretsky/status/1134547532149854208 That said, any company, especially one working with Fortune 500's, should have DB backups in at least two places. If they'd had the data, they could have spun up their service on a different hosting provider relatively easily.

>That said, any company, especially one working with Fortune 500's, should have DB backups in at least two places Yes they should. How many 2-man shops do you think follow all the proper backup and security procedures?

It could literally be a cron job that dumps your DB to a desktop computer once a week. Not exactly CIA-level stuff.

Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#102

Post by beejiu » Fri, May 31, 2019, 8:34 PM UTC

jlv2 wrote: post #40

Best Twitter comment (grammar errors and all): "And if your full business relies on one tech partner (no offsite backups) your not doing your tech job right."

You'll be surprised how many companies are "all in" on AWS or Google Cloud, including ALL backups.

Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#103

Post by pkrefta » Fri, May 31, 2019, 8:34 PM UTC

The quality of DigitalOcean communications in this case - especially email responses look like worst examples from some pretty terrible corporations. I thought DO was (is?) trying to differ from them.

Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#104

Post by the_common_man » Fri, May 31, 2019, 8:35 PM UTC

wpietri wrote: post #82

Does anybody know what they actually do? I dug around to find a Wayback version that actually had text. I understand the words on their own, but when put together I get nothing: https://web.archive.org/web/20181030015237/https://raisup.co...

I think it helps large companies track up and coming startups.

Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#105

Post by bitL » Fri, May 31, 2019, 8:36 PM UTC

Heh, that reminds me when a director of one unit of a "world's top 10 brand" I was working at on big data architecture told me that they always knew when I ran anything on the cloud as I brought it down within a few seconds of my heavily multi-threaded processing scripts. I guess DigitalOcean decided that instead of fixing their infrastructure they just kill their own smart clients.

I find this enforced mediocrity pretty appalling. With barely functional "anomaly detection" Deep Learning models with dubious decision making (I did some so I am familiar with the "landscape") it's gonna be a lot of fun for anything slightly deviating from whatever vague norm that can't be explained nor tested against.

Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#106

Post by type0 » Fri, May 31, 2019, 8:36 PM UTC

shuzchen wrote: post #87

If you're reading this and concerned for your own backup story, fret not! In 2019 secure off-premise backups are super easy to implement, even for a 1 person shop. Get something like Restic or Borg or any one of the enumerated options here: https://github.com/restic/others I've recently implemented backups with Restic, the static binary and plethora of supported storage backends was extremely appealing. The easiest s…

> The easiest seems to be to just point it at a S3 bucket, but given most people have infrastructure on AWS (off-premise means off-premise) having other options supported out of the box is pretty handy.

Sure, having other options is good: https://min.io/

Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#107

Post by wayoutthere » Fri, May 31, 2019, 8:37 PM UTC

macspoofing wrote: post #89

_bxg1 wrote: post #64

Looks like Moisey Uretsky personally intervened fairly quickly: https://twitter.com/moiseyuretsky/status/1134547532149854208 That said, any company, especially one working with Fortune 500's, should have DB backups in at least two places. If they'd had the data, they could have spun up their service on a different hosting provider relatively easily.

>That said, any company, especially one working with Fortune 500's, should have DB backups in at least two places Yes they should. How many 2-man shops do you think follow all the proper backup and security procedures?

Which is exactly why I won’t sign contracts with bootstrapped startups in an enterprise context.

Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#108

Post by julianlam » Fri, May 31, 2019, 8:39 PM UTC

txcwpalpha wrote: post #59

atonse wrote: post #6

I’m certainly getting downvoted for this. Not at all trying to blame the original posters and victims: While they seem great for hobbyist and small business sites, there’s no way I’d trust Fortune 500 client business to something like DigitalOcean. I just don’t see the benefits over a more established operation like AWS, Azure or GCP. Saving $50 here and there isn’t worth it.

DigitalOcean is established. They're newer than GCP and about the same age as Azure, and IIRC at one point were the second largest VPS provider, second only to AWS. And unfortunately this stuff happens to your "established" examples as well. Here [1] is a particular example of Google shutting down an entire GCP account with no explanation. Some comments report the same on AWS as well. Ironically, people in that HN th…

We rely almost exclusively on DigitalOcean and the stories about Google shutting down accounts really gives me pause. It's not an isolated incident either, and raising support is next to impossible, so I hear.

I'm lucky enough that my spend with DO is high enough to qualify for support, so if this ever happened to me at least I know I'd get a couple chances to make things right

Were this to happen on GCP I'm fairly certain they'd just black hole my account since I'm spare change to them.

Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#109

Post by badrequest » Fri, May 31, 2019, 8:39 PM UTC

macspoofing wrote: post #89

_bxg1 wrote: post #64

Looks like Moisey Uretsky personally intervened fairly quickly: https://twitter.com/moiseyuretsky/status/1134547532149854208 That said, any company, especially one working with Fortune 500's, should have DB backups in at least two places. If they'd had the data, they could have spun up their service on a different hosting provider relatively easily.

>That said, any company, especially one working with Fortune 500's, should have DB backups in at least two places Yes they should. How many 2-man shops do you think follow all the proper backup and security procedures?

"2-man teams generally don't prioritize backups" isn't an excuse for not prioritizing backups.

Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#110

Post by raverbashing » Fri, May 31, 2019, 8:40 PM UTC

_bxg1 wrote: post #64

Looks like Moisey Uretsky personally intervened fairly quickly: https://twitter.com/moiseyuretsky/status/1134547532149854208 That said, any company, especially one working with Fortune 500's, should have DB backups in at least two places. If they'd had the data, they could have spun up their service on a different hosting provider relatively easily.

Yeah there might be some unpleasant internal conversations following that event