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"DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

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Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#241

Post by cptskippy »

Let me see if I get this straight...

Developer has a Python script that takes 1 second per record to execute and he has 500,00 records to process, so he spins up 10 distinct VMs each running the same Python script to parallelize the task.

The provider shuts him down and cites a section of the EULA that says "You shall not take any action that imposes an unreasonable... load on our infrastructure." Basically saying "Hey whatever you did, don't do that."

Developer gets his account restored and then proceeds to do exactly what he did to get it locked out the first time around.

Also Developer has all his eggs in one basket.

Shitty customer/product service aside, someone explain to me why DigitalOcean is at fault here?

Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#242

Post by jolmg »

rapind wrote: post #196
thaumaturgy wrote: post #114

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.

Could you give some concrete examples on how their service has degraded? I've been using their service for years for light stuff, and I haven't had any problems.

Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#243

Post by aftbit »

cptskippy wrote: post #241

Let me see if I get this straight... Developer has a Python script that takes 1 second per record to execute and he has 500,00 records to process, so he spins up 10 distinct VMs each running the same Python script to parallelize the task. The provider shuts him down and cites a section of the EULA that says "You shall not take any action that imposes an unreasonable... load on our infrastructure." Basically saying "H…

Why would DO be upset about spinning up 10 VMs then spinning them down again? Isn't this exactly the point of cloud providers? This is what they bill me for, right?

Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#244

Post by korethr »

docker_up wrote: post #157

I thought Fortune 500 companies (at least the enterprise companies I dealt with) that had checklists for their SAAS vendors that had to check off things like Disaster Recovery Readiness, etc. At the very least this company learned a hard lesson about Disaster Recovery best practices. Hopefully all the up and coming companies reading this story learns as well. Also please remember that a backup that isn't tested IS NO…

My personal experience such questionnaires is that the questions can be vague, redundant, or not even really ask anything at all. But, even when the questions are concise and precise, it's all to easy to "word smith" an answer that seems to give the desired answer without every actually saying anything. And the person administering said checklist may not even know enough about what the checklist is checking to vet the answers.

Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#245

Post by yks »

walrus01 wrote: post #173
thaumaturgy wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This race to the bottom has reached a point that it's harming customers. It's okay to be more expensive than the competition if you provide a better service.

Personal opinion, it's really important in the ISP/hosting world to identify what market categories are a race to the bottom, and if at all possible, refuse to participate in them. I look at companies selling $5 to $15/month VPS services and try to figure out how many customers they need to be set up for monthly recurring services, in order to pay for reasonably reliable and redundant infrastructure, and the math jus…

Unfortunately there is no guarantee that I receive any better support at the more expensive provider though

Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#246

Post by andrewstuart »

Why is killing accounts part of the way they do business in any way, EVER?

That's what destroys company reputation.

I may be wrong but my understanding is that the gold standard - Amazon Web Services - will only ever suspend your account until an issue is sorted out.

Whoever runs Digital Ocean needs to stand up and say very loud and clear to this community that they will never, ever delete accounts - if he doesn't then he can live with the business destroying reputation of Digital Ocean being "one of those account killing companies".

What company would ever host on "an account killer" - the risk is way too high.

Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#247

Post by emdowling »

While DO is not without fault in this story, any Fortune 500 company would have to be pretty stupid to work with this company after they admit to not storing backups in other places. I feel for you, but a backup is not a backup if it’s subject to the same weaknesses as the master copy.

Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#249

Post by timvisee »

keypusher wrote: post #179

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…

In case something looking like a DDoS, they tend to disable network access to droplets until you manually 'resolve' it. Instead of destroying the whole account.

Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#250

Post by _7siz »

vbezhenar wrote: post #88
_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.

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

Accidents can happen. Don't really blame Digital Ocean for the accidental locking but this response is insane: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D76ocofXoAY_xB5.png
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