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"DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

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Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#331

Post by Havoc »

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…

>the support on Linode is way, way, way better than DO's.

Can't comment about support, but DO's tutorials on linux server random task 101 are fantastic.

I was surprised how much of my ubuntu server setup googling ended up on DO pages.

Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#332

Post by zerotolerance »

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…

My guess is that the whole story is trash considering I found out about it via promoted tweet. Someone paid to put that on my feed. Noise.

Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#333

Post by dsl »

voldemort1968 wrote: post #193
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…

I agree that we're not getting the full story. On the other hand, completely shutting down all their services without a quick conversation...

Having been on the receiving end of terribly broken "pipelines" at startups wanting to hammer away at my resources, the right response is terminate first discuss later.

I know of a company that explicitly had a "call us to discuss first" clause in their contract with a smaller cloud provider. Everyone was on holiday and not answering the phones while their hacked account was being used to spin up dozens of boxes launching a DoS attack against a crypto scam site. Guess who had to eat the bill on that one?

Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#334

Post by dcbadacd »

duskwuff wrote: post #321
andrewstuart wrote: post #246

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 th…

> Why is killing accounts part of the way they do business in any way, EVER? Because fraud and abuse exist. Sometimes customers really are doing malicious things which need to be stopped immediately, and the only thing that will make that happen is disabling their account. Trying to make accommodations for those users is a fast path to getting sued, getting blacklisted by mail providers, and/or losing your upstream c…

Disabling != deleting.

Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#335

Post by zeta0134 »

hackermailman wrote: post #301
znpy wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 e…

I'm fortunate that my own company (Rackspace) at least has a level head about this sort of thing. My direct manager looks at my numbers (~60-80 interactions per month) and my colleagues (many hundreds of interactions per month) and correctly observes that we have different strengths, and that's the end of the discussion. I have a tendency to take my time and go deep on issues, and my coworkers will send me tickets that need that sort of investigative troubleshooting. My coworker meanwhile will rapidly run through the queue and look for simple tickets to knock out. He sweeps the quick-fix work away, but also knows his limits and will escalate the stuff he's not familiar with.

Let me stress here, this is not nearly as easy of a problem to solve as it appears to be on the surface. We're struggling as a company right now because after our recent merge, a lot of our good talent has left and we're having to rebuild a lot of our teams. Even so, I'm still happy with our general approach. Management understands that employees will often have wildly different problem solving approaches and matching metrics, and that's perfectly OK as long as folks aren't genuinely slacking off and we as a team are still getting our customers taken care of. I think that's important to keep in mind no matter how big or small your support floor gets.

Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#336

Post by dkempner »

perrygeo wrote: post #329

> Every 2-3 months we had to execute a python script that takes 1s on all our data (500k rows), to make it faster we execute it in parallel on multiple droplets ~10 that we set up only for this pipeline and shut down once it’s done. Wait, a whole distributed computing sub-system to make a 1s process faster? > I got their final message right after arriving in Portugal. Did he initiate the script from a IP address outs…

> Wait, a whole distributed computing sub-system to make a 1s process faster?

I think OP means 1s per row, so 138 hours.

Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#337

Post by cbsks »

perrygeo wrote: post #329

> Every 2-3 months we had to execute a python script that takes 1s on all our data (500k rows), to make it faster we execute it in parallel on multiple droplets ~10 that we set up only for this pipeline and shut down once it’s done. Wait, a whole distributed computing sub-system to make a 1s process faster? > I got their final message right after arriving in Portugal. Did he initiate the script from a IP address outs…

Maybe he meant 1s per row? i.e. 500k seconds or 139 hours.

Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#338

Post by grayed-down »

keypusher wrote: post #170
amelius wrote: post #27

What other business shuts their customers out if they use too much of their product?

All-you-can-eat buffets

Yes! My college roommate was shutdown in Las Vegas after eating for 3 hours. That was thirty years ago and I still can't stop laughing after witnessing such a debacle.

Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#339

Post by unilynx »

nodesocket wrote: post #320
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 1…

They’re working on that and were sending out surveys a couple of weeks ago whether customers would be interested. They had a slightly higher minimum amount in mind for premier support

You already get bumped to a higher tier of support once you hit 500/month spend for no additional fees but that just gives you promises for lower response times

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