Live data from Hacker News

"DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

twitter.com

191–200 of 620 posts

Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#191
post #124
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.

Having backups in two places could easily triple the hosting costs. The question is what costs more. Eg. Losing data vs backup costs.

Triple hosting costs?

Literally just push a postgres dump to S3 (or any other storage provider) once a night as a "just in case something stupid happens with my primary cloud provider". It'd take a couple hours tops to set up and cost next to nothing.

Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#193

Given that the author was quite vague about the nature of this “pipeline” and that their product is an “AI-powered Startup Selection engine”, I have a suspicion they were probably crawling and scraping a whole bunch of pages for new startups. It’s possible that this was totally legit and it just looked like a ddos attack, or that it was something else entirely, but everyone here seems to have taken him at his word th…

I agree that we're not getting the full story.

On the other hand, completely shutting down all their services without a quick conversation...

Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#194
post #153
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."

On the other hand: Get customers and traction before you build a multi-site, fault-tolerant, self-healing, webscale platform that Google would be proud to have. I think we needlessly shame one-person operations for focusing on actual customer needs instead of ops busywork and yak shaving.

This is a lesson on hyperbole.

No one that I've seen so far is saying they should have a system that is "muilti-site, fault-tolerant, self-healing, webscale that Google would be proud to have".

They are saying run a simple backup and keep it literally anywhere else.

I think we needlessly hyperbolize "do a backup once a month and keep it somewhere else" into some sort of NSA operation.

Its backups. Its 2019. Its dead-easy and very affordable.

Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably because of publicity. How many of those companies went bankrupt silently, because their case did not cause much attention in news?

Agreed, but it's not like the original poster had a huge platform, he just posted about it on Twitter. I may despise Twitter for a bunch of different reasons, but I can't deny it's a great tool for raising issues to companies.

He has 4300 followers on twitter. What if he had 50?

Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#196

Some people on HN hate Linode because of their past security screwups (which is valid), but having used both DO and Linode quite a lot, the support on Linode is way, way, way better than DO's. DO's tier 1 support is almost useless. I set up a new account with them recently for a droplet that needed to be well separated from the rest of my infrastructure, and ran into a confusing error message that was preventing it f…

I've been on Linode for 8+ years now (moved there from Slicehost when Rackspace swallowed them up) and their service (not necessarily customer support) has significantly degraded. Not sure I blame them though. They've become far more popular since I started with them and are probably doing their best to grow... but I no longer recommend them as I used to.

Just my experience though.

Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#197

Some people on HN hate Linode because of their past security screwups (which is valid), but having used both DO and Linode quite a lot, the support on Linode is way, way, way better than DO's. DO's tier 1 support is almost useless. I set up a new account with them recently for a droplet that needed to be well separated from the rest of my infrastructure, and ran into a confusing error message that was preventing it f…

Long-time Linode customer here. What were the security screwups? I tried a couple searches but didn't turn up anything.

Here's a search that will help, look no further than the site you're already on:

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=linode%20security&sort=byPopul...

They've had several high-profile breaches over the years.

Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "2-man teams generally don't prioritize backups" isn't an excuse for not prioritizing backups. They had backups, but being arbitrarily cut-off from their hosting provider wasn't part of their threat model. Isn't a big part of cloud marketing the idea that they're so good at redundancy, etc. that you don't need to attempt that stuff on your own? The idea that you have to spread your infrastructure across multiple cl…

> In any case, it's also probably too much infrastructure cost for a 2-man company. keeping your production and your backups in the same cloud provider is the equivalent of keeping your backup tapes right next to the computer they're backing up. you're exposing them both to strongly correlated risks. you've just changed those risks from "fire, water, theft" to "provider, incompetence, security breach"

So what is the purpose of the massive level of redundancy that you are already paying for when you store a file on S3? I don’t think it’s terribly common for even medium sized companies to have a multi tier1 cloud backup strategy.

Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#200
post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whether it's normally a consideration or not, there are no meaningful barriers in terms of cost or effort, so it's totally realistic to expect it of a tiny startup. Every week there's another article on HN about a tiny business being squished in the gears of a giant, automated platform. In some cases like app stores this is unavoidable, but there are plenty of hosting providers to choose from. People need to learn th…

And there are a million stories of startups who build the wrong thing, don't achieve product-market fit, etc. You can't dot every I, cross every t and also build a compelling product as a 2 person shop.

Backups aren't "dotting i's and crossing t's", they're fundamental. FFS, just rsync your database directory somewhere.
Post reply on HN