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DigitalOcean lost our server

murze.be

191–200 of 219 posts

Re: DigitalOcean lost our server

#191
post #152

I'm more worried about the following post in that thread: -------------------------------------------------------- We were loyal customers of DigitalOcean for over 2 years. We showed up to work one morning and had a client email stating that their website was down. We checked, sure enough. We tried logging in to our DI account and it said it was suspended. After searching around, we realized our CC had expired. No bi…

I'm looking for a good host, was considering DO, but now I'm not. Any suggestions?

According to me DO is still a good hosting company. Works good for the price you pay. Taking offsite backups is always a good idea.

Re: DigitalOcean lost our server

#192
post #7

This seems like a non-issue to me. If you're using an IaaS provider you should be treating the network as volatile from the get-go. This is the reason AWS has things like auto-scaling groups. You should be designing for failure in "the cloud"

Remember the blog posts during the early days of AWS? People didn't realize their new elastic cloud servers could go into thin air

Dissolve into thin air? That's what clouds do, right? (One woulda thunk the word "cloud" in itself would be warning aplenty ;))

Re: DigitalOcean lost our server

#193
post #152

I'm more worried about the following post in that thread: -------------------------------------------------------- We were loyal customers of DigitalOcean for over 2 years. We showed up to work one morning and had a client email stating that their website was down. We checked, sure enough. We tried logging in to our DI account and it said it was suspended. After searching around, we realized our CC had expired. No bi…

I had the opposite experience, my CC expired with DO, but I didn't have a new one for about 2 weeks. I didn't have any issues with just waiting to the next billing cycle and paying double then to cover the negative.

Re: DigitalOcean lost our server

#194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>We've been a customer for 2 years, surely they could pick up the phone and call us. I don't understand that reasoning from customers to be honest. That right there, throws away the $5 and $10 plans. Having some one trying to contact a customer, just because their credit card expired, cost more than the actual hosting. Top tier service does comes from companies with $5 a month plans. I'm sorry it just doesn't.

> We've spent thousands of dollars with them. That's a decent amount of money right? It sounds like they were not using the $5 plans.

Over two years, that's what, eight $10 droplets or sixteen $5 droplet.

I would guess that if you want a hosting company to be proactive you need $100+ per month.

Re: DigitalOcean lost our server

#195
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're going to switch to linode you might just as well use any public torrent tracker to store your backups.

What did Linode do this time?

You mean besides having a very long history of covering up hacks and straight up deceiving their customers?

Re: DigitalOcean lost our server

#196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope, the only assurance you can get is you won't be access your data, I am not sure how one can come down with conclusion of "no way they have a copy or keep it in archive/deep backup" Having a backup and letting you to access it are two entirely different issues, and most of the time customer service staff don't know how the data management is being done by the engineering/operations team.

If you have used shared hosting you know as soon as you pay for your expired account, everything is back as it was. Never thought this was a problem until you try to test how long you can go until you pay and still restore you data. If DO's CC can't handle data management problems they probably will connect you to their engg/ops team. So I would assume they would prefer having it resolved ( by giving the data if they…

I agree with the first paragraph.

The second paragraph hinges on the rationale that if customer data were available, then CS (Customer Service) agents would have made every effort to contact the ops/engineering team to retrieve those to avoid a social disaster.

Unfortunately, this isn't true in the companies that I worked for, which are big customer-facing MNCs.

First of all, for US consumers, the CS teams most likely are contractors in Philippines, Malaysia, or India, they are trained with scripted responses. For any issue that is beyond the scripts, their standard response will be "Sorry we can't help you because we can't do x", one reason is they have no incentive to escalate the issue and get oneself more work to follow up, other times, it is the management explicitly decided this is to prevent too many cases hit the ops and eventually, the engineering teams. It is not that the management is stupid or nasty, just that the 20:80 rule dictates 80% of the issues usually are raised by 20% of particularly picky customers. For the 20% customers who generate 80% of the revenue, each of them will be assigned an AM (Account Manager) who can get things done much faster and more efficient than the CS team. This group of high-value customers are often given access to VPs to make sure all their issues are heard and handled properly

Second reason is most teams in a big company will not concern anything that doesn't hit them directly. For example the CS team in my ex-company upon getting repeated complaint on an erratic component that didn't get bug fix for months, eventually the CS told the upset customer to fuck off and complain to CEO directly since it was engineering department's fault.

Unbelievable? Maybe, and that company remains one of the largest high-tech companies in the world.

Re: DigitalOcean lost our server

#197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What did Linode do this time?

You mean besides having a very long history of covering up hacks and straight up deceiving their customers?

Yes exactly besides that. What makes you feel your data is public that its better to host on a public tracker?

Because all those earlier breaches(which you are referring to) revealed customer info not their data. If this was your point of user info, I wouldn't have asked.

Re: DigitalOcean lost our server

#198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a huge company like DO, but iwStack [1] provides a SAN backed cloud, with selectable KVM/XEN instances, custom ISO and virtual network support. The prices are similar to DO. [1] http://iwstack.com/

That's pretty damn interesting for more traditional hosting type usage. Seems like they sell 50 GB of real SAN backed storage for just 3.6€ per month. How can they afford to be so cheap?

I think one of the reasons is that they only have a small number of datacenters, have a small number of (very friendly) staff and are not going after the mass market like DO, and I guess they don't spend anything on marketing.

Re: DigitalOcean lost our server

#199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean besides having a very long history of covering up hacks and straight up deceiving their customers?

Yes exactly besides that. What makes you feel your data is public that its better to host on a public tracker? Because all those earlier breaches(which you are referring to) revealed customer info not their data. If this was your point of user info, I wouldn't have asked.

Every single one of the previous hacks was used to access customer VMs, except for the passwordless MySQL server they had.

Re: DigitalOcean lost our server

#200

To my surprise, this HN thread has no link to any external backup solution guide or little-to-no suggestion of best way to backup your server to an external service or another VPS/backup server.

I use Tarsnap and really enjoy it!
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