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"DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

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Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#301

Post by hackermailman »

znpy wrote: post #135
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 have interviewed with DO and they tried diverting me towards a support position. They told me that on a single day a support engineer was supposed to help/advice customers on pretty much whatever the customer was having issue with and also handle something between 80-120 tickets per day. It's nice to see that DO is willing to help on pretty much anything they (read: their team) has knowledge about, but with 80-120…

I once worked for eBay a long time ago, and support consisted of 4 concurrent chats, offering pre-programmed macros often pointing to terribly written documentation the person had already read and was confused about. If you took the time to actually assist somebody you were chastised in a weekly review where they went over your chat support. The person doing mine told me I had the highest satisfaction record in the entire company, and a 'unique gift of clear and concise conversation, like you're actually talking to them face to face' then said I'd be fired next week because my coworkers were knocking off hundreds of tickets a day just using automated responses, leaving their customers fuming in anger with low satisfaction ratings, as people are very aware of being fed automated responses but the goal was not real support, it was just clearing the tickets by any means possible. I decided to try half and half, so if the support question was written by somebody who obviously would not understand the documentation (grandma trying to sell a car), I would help them but just provide shit support to everybody else in the form of macros like my coworkers. Of course this was unacceptable and I got canned the next week as promised. Was an interesting experience, I can imagine DO having an insane scope to their support requests like 'what is postgresql'.

Anyway imho you should have taken the support position and schemed your way into development internally. This was my plan at eBay before they fired me, though they shut down the branch here a few months later and moved to the Philippines anyway so I wouldn't have lasted long regardless.

Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#302

Post by dahfizz »

jwr wrote: post #286
dahfizz wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you like that to have been addressed? I think it's entirely reasonable for companies to have that option. "You are doing something malicious and against the rules, you have been permanently removed". In this case, that option was misused, but I don't think the existence of that possiblity is inheritly surprising.

Access to your data should never be denied. Ever. It was not DigitalOcean's data. If you are a hosting provider, you can't ever hold customer data hostage or deny them access to it in any way.

Again, I must disagree. If DO genuinely believed that you were doing something malicious and that data was harmful or evil for you to own (e.g. other people's SSN, etc) then they are in the "right" to deny access to it. DO should not be forced to aid bad actors.

And, regardless of what DO should or should not do, they can do whatever they want with their own hard drives. You should structure your business accordingly.

Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#303

Post by mooreds »

klank wrote: post #273
windowsworkstoo wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, this is spot on - I used to work on a webhosting help desk and could bang out about 100 tickets a shift, because so many were small queries that required no depth work.

Old MSFT rule of thumbs was 2 bugs per day during bug crunch mode. Sounds crazy, but when you consider the number of "this text is wrong" and "that text box is too short" bugs that existed after a year of furious development, it wasn't too hard to achieve. Gotta hit that ZBB!

Per day? Or per hour?

Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#304

Post by alexis_fr »

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…

There is the same risk of being kicked off when using Amazon AWS. The rules are different, but there will be situations where you lose everything (imagine you become visible for a political reason and the landscape shifts a bit).

Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#305

Post by truncate »

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…

`unreasonable load` sounds pretty vague. What counts as unreasonable? 10 VMs doesn't sound like much, and I believe if I'm renting a VM with XYZ specs, I should be allowed to use up-to max capacity it says so in specs. What am I missing here?

Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#306

Post by fgonzag »

fastball wrote: post #279
taffer wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, a backup would have been a significant improvement, but still – a backup only protects against data loss and not against downtime.

That's probably a reason to use containerization / other technologies so that you can spin up your services in a couple minutes on a different cloud provider.

You don't need to use containers for that.. all you have to do is set up a warm replica of the service with another provider. The fail over doesn't even have to be automatic, but that is the minimum amount of redundancy any production SaaS should have.

Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#307

Post by tnolet »

nathan-io wrote: post #295
bcooks wrote: post #270

As DigitalOcean's CTO, I'm very sorry for this situation and how it was handled. The account is now fully restored and we are doing an investigation of the incident. We are planning to post a public postmortem to provide full transparency for our customers and the community. This situation occurred due to false positives triggered by our internal fraud and abuse systems. While these situations are rare, they do happe…

Mistakes happen, and algorithms are sometimes a necessary part of scale/efficiency. Everyone understands that. That said, what's highly troubling as a DO customer (and someone who is planning to deploy startup infrastructure of my own with DO) is: 1) The discrepancy between this customer's experience and clear assurances made on this very forum by high-level DO employees that: a. warnings are ALWAYS issued before sus…

Not sure why you’re being downvoted. Point 2 is very relevant. Scaling instances due to sudden peaks should be totally safe. Even when automated. Guess AWS is still lonely at the top.

Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#308

Post by nikanj »

walrus01 wrote: post #263
yks wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

At a certain price point, yes there is, if you're paying $800/month for hosting services to a mid sized regional ISP with presence at major IX points. That ISP cares about its reputation, and cares about the revenue it's getting from you. I can tell you that as a person whose job title includes "network engineer", we have a number of customers who have critical server/VM functions similar to these people who had the…

Having paid substantial amounts for various services over the years, paying hundreds of dollars per month doesn't automatically make you into a priority.

There seems to be a sweet spot for company size here. Too small companies can't support you even though they really want to. Large companies are busy chasing millions in big contracts, and don't really care about your $800 per month at all.

Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#309

Post by nijave »

kelp wrote: post #62
jerf wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It's interesting how many companies simply shut down service rather than say give a warning and wait for a response (or at least start a clock)." I'm sure many people have started their companies firmly convinced that they'll give plenty of warnings and never automatically shut anything down. The problem is, you rapidly discover that doesn't scale, not even on a human level. You send your notice. 48 hours later, you…

This is exactly why AWS has relatively low default account limits, and you have to open a support ticket to raise them. It's largely to prevent run-away costs from surprising the customer.

This. It's fairly easy to setup from the provider side and easily solves this problem. Rate limits are fairly easy and can be automated based on criteria like account length/payment/abuse incidents. I think disabling the account is a little heavy handed unless it's brand new
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