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"DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

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Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#311

Post by walrus01 »

nikanj wrote: post #308
walrus01 wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Very good points. What I would recommend is to use a mid sized ISP in your local area where you can meet with people in person. At higher dollar figures there should be some sales person and network engineer you can meet in their local office, meet for coffee, discuss your requirements, and have something of a real business relationship with. You and your company should be personally known to them.

If you are just some semi anonymous faceless person ordering services off a credit card payment form on a website, all bets are off...

Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#312

Post by mr_toad »

_7siz wrote: post #250
vbezhenar wrote: post #88

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?

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

> Don't really blame Digital Ocean for the accidental locking

I find it concerning that they have such a low threshold for triggering a lock. 10 droplets is hardly cloud scale.

Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#313

Post by unixhero »

emdowling wrote: post #247

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.

True. Any sane Fortune500 should do it's supplier Due Diligence before signing over business critical functionality to a third party.

Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#314

Post by karlmcguire »

rhacker wrote: post #283

I am a software developer and yes software is eating the world. One of the side effects of software eating the world is out of control software. * Autobans in facebook * Cheated instacart drivers * $10000 stolen from thousands of bank accounts (and returned hopefully) on Etsy * Tesla cars literally killing people (it now feels like it's once a month right?) Now the software that runs software is running amok. The int…

This reminds me of recent talk by Jonathan Blow [1], where he talks about how we've made very little progress in the field of software and anything that appears to be progress is just software leveraging better hardware.

It's quite scary how low our standards have gotten.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pW-SOdj4Kkk

Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#315

Post by abawany »

busterarm wrote: post #41
StudentStuff wrote: post #31

DigitalOcean is operating worse than a fly by night host (like AlphaRacks, GreenValueHost, etc). The reasonable course of action would've been to email the customer and throttle their API access to prevent load spikes, but DO instead locked their entire account (not just the service that DO felt was being abused). A fly by night will often only suspend the VM or database that is in question, not other services on the…

Really? Big European VPS hosts like OVH just turn off your stuff until the problem goes away. Hardly fly-by-night.

A machine on a GCP project got compromised. GCP emailed us right away and we fixed the issues promptly. No outages, no arbitrary suspension, and no grief apart from the compromise.

Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#316

Post by charlus »

This isn't assuring to read at all. I'm trying to build and still relying heavily on DO, for what is becoming thousands in profit quite quickly. Frankly, I'm very uninterested in resolving a problem in hosting - mostly because it's boring, but because DO seems nice to use in every other way.

On the other hand - I'm becoming increasingly aware of the inevitable Twitter-social-media-pile-on for any company ever.

Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#317

Post by lone_haxx0r »

_7siz wrote: post #250
vbezhenar wrote: post #88

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?

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

DO has shown that their service is simply not suitable for some use cases: those that impose an "unreasonable" load on their infraestructure.

Even worse: they don't explicitly state what is considered "unreasonable". So, if your business is serious, you have to assume the worst-case scenario: DO can't be used for anything

Conclusion: Digital Ocean is just for testing, playing around, not suitable for production.

Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#318

Post by duskwuff »

dahfizz wrote: post #302
jwr wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

For some practical, if extreme, examples: if a customer were to host a phishing site, or a site hosting CP, it would be grossly irresponsible (and likely even illegal) for the hosting provider to retain the customer's data after account suspension and allow them to download it.

Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#319

Post by ummonk »

_bxg1 wrote: post #115
vbezhenar wrote: post #88

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?

Sure. Hopefully it results in a change of policy, or at least a public statement of some kind. Everyone can't depend on the cofounder to come in and save them from bad automation.

From the looks of it they will be posting a public postmortem to their status page.

Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#320

Post by nodesocket »

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…

This headline is grossly misleading and very clickbaity "Killed our company". It's not exactly big business that you scale up to 10 droplets for short bursts, I am willing to bet their spend on DigitalOcean is less than $500 a month, yet the author is expecting enterprise support.

DigitalOcean should go the route of AWS and kill off free support completely and offer paid support plans. Something like $49 a month or 10% of the accounts monthly spend.

If you are a serious company with paying Fortune 500 customers, you need to act serious and pay up for premium support and stop expecting free.

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