Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

"DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

391–400 of 620 posts

Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#391

Post by Pxtl »

guhidalg wrote: post #146
nikanj wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linode is definitely in the minority here. Most companies, in tech and outside of it, seem to follow the DO model. Twitter provides decent service, and the official help channels provide canned responses and template emails. I somewhat blame people in tech, actually. More than one company is creating products that "cut customer service costs via machine learning", which is code for "pick keywords from incoming ticket…

There’s nothing wrong with that approach, the person raising the support ticket likely hasn’t read through all the documentation of the product they’re using.

In all my experience with support, I have been referred to a document that helped me with my problem literally zero times, because if something went wrong the first thing I did was Google it and so I already saw the unhelpful document.

Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#393

Post by fogetti »

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…

I agree with you, and I was coming here to find similar thinking folks in the comment section and the most worrying thing is that I haven't found any except you. Most people seem to take it as a normal thing that software simply ruins lives and businesses. Todays developers' simply have no ethics. Also most developers seem to think that they can do whatever and they can get away with it, because y'know "Reasons". Sigh. :(

I really don't understand this sheeple thinking, for example most people simply don't understand that an automated fraud detection system is not a technologically important thing, it's an economically important cost management system effectively.

Just like companies externalize the cost of helpdesk personnel by operating an automated call center (and by proxy making the customer bear the cost), the goal is the same with fraud systems. But we cannot just simply throw our arms up in the air or shrug our shoulders when the companies leverage our lives this way.

Take Facebook for example, they acted like they had no responsibility or any power to review and take down or prevent toxic and/or hateful comments by employing human reviewers until they were forced to do so in some countries. And guess what, they had no trouble doing so, their profit might have reduced somewhat, but not that much.

So all in all, anyone who thinks he has integrity as a developer should take a look into himself when he justifies systems like fraud systems (or any other unnecessary cost reducing actions) as necessary. They are economically beneficial, yes; necessary, no.

Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#394

Post by fouc »

nikanj wrote: post #143
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…

Linode is definitely in the minority here. Most companies, in tech and outside of it, seem to follow the DO model. Twitter provides decent service, and the official help channels provide canned responses and template emails. I somewhat blame people in tech, actually. More than one company is creating products that "cut customer service costs via machine learning", which is code for "pick keywords from incoming ticket…

Linode was more of a bootstrapped business, it grew slowly and steadily. Digital Ocean was always built to grow fast from the beginning.

I think that the size of the company or how fast they grow is a good proxy for having poor customer support. What we should be doing is finding the slow growing businesses or the mid-tier (not too small, not too big) businesses to take our business to.

Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#395

Post by rat9988 »

BinaryIdiot wrote: post #85
jlv2 wrote: 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."

Maybe. But don't forget this is a small company of just two people. Yes the backups should have been off site but relying on just one digital partner at that scale isn't the worst (they're unlikely to have the money or time to federate out to other services). Yes, ideally they would have already tested their back-up solution, the back-ups would be offsite and, if something like this happened, they could stand-up on a…

Actually, you can implement cheap external backups even in a 1-man company.

But I still support that DO here is a 100% liable toward their client. Now the liability between the said client and his own clients is an other matter.

Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#396

Post by nathan-io »

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…

I'm no longer able to edit the above comment, so to elaborate on #1:

Following is a comment[1] by Moisey Uretsky in another thread[2]:

> Depending on which items are flagged the account is put into a locked state, which means that access is limited. However, the droplets for that account and other services are not affected at all. The account is also notified about the action and a dialogue is opened, to determine what the situation is. There is no sudden loss of service. There is no loss of service without communication. If after multiple rounds of communication it is determined that the account is fraudulent, even then there is no loss of service that isn't communicated well in advance of the situation.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18296344

2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18294940

This is why I'm so confused by the case under discussion, because the customer appeared to have been completely locked out without warning.

Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#398

Post by bogomipz »

_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

Agreed. I actually had to reread that a few times because I could not believe that someone actually approved of that text.

That text suggests larger organizational problems within the company.

Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#399

Post by nine_k »

Something that made me scratch my head:

* The company quickly creates and starts 10 VMs and triggers an automated lock-down, with a message mentioning a sudden spike of activity.

* The company gets the account unlocked.

* The company again quickly creates and starts 10 VMs, and triggers the auto-lockdown again.

Note to self: when something damaging happens as a result of a seemingly normal action, avoid doing that same seemingly normal action immediately again, lest the damaging consequences hit again.

Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#400

Post by cannonedhamster »

AYBABTME wrote: post #379
Aeolun wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But, isn’t hiring all over the world exactly because it is cheaper for the same kind of talent. I’m sure the company doesn’t do it out of the goodness of their heart. Then of course, there is no guarantee these people speak and understand english perfectly.

I would say it's not. There's many advantages to hiring remote workers, they've been discussed at length elsewhere. One advantage is not having to pay office space, which indeed lowers cost. However DO has a nice office in Manhattan so really... they're not saving much money. And then on the term of compensation, for some reason DO pays it's remote employees really well. I don't know how this changed in recent years…

I can concur from a company that is not DO we hire workers in locations around the glove specifically to have people awake in their normal time zones, not because it's cheaper because it's not always cheaper. There are many countries that have a large portion of very intelligent and multi lingual people, especially when it comes to English. Just because someone isn't a native English speaker, or speaks in different dialect doesn't mean that they are any less capable.
Post reply on HN