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"DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

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Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#41

Post by busterarm »

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.

Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#42

Post by jerf »

duxup wrote: post #2

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). Granted that would require people to communicate and use some form of reason. Even DMCA for all its warts fires up a warning and has a response mechanism (granted other issues there).

"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've gotten no response. If you act now, it isn't materially different from your point of view as if you simply acted right away.

Also, in a cloud environment, even Digital Ocean, as many people have learned the hard way with leaked credentials, you can rack up charges faster than the relevant humans can even conceivably be notified. As the hosting company, you can't just let abusive or accidental usage go. You can refund their money, but that's still resources of yours that went to something that failed to produce revenue rather than something that did; you can't absorb that indefinitely.

I'm pretty sure you'll inevitably discover that you have no choice but to put automation in.

Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#43

Post by rsweeney21 »

atonse wrote: post #6

I’m certainly getting downvoted for this. Not at all trying to blame the original posters and victims: While they seem great for hobbyist and small business sites, there’s no way I’d trust Fortune 500 client business to something like DigitalOcean. I just don’t see the benefits over a more established operation like AWS, Azure or GCP. Saving $50 here and there isn’t worth it.

Just because you have fortune 500 clients doesn't mean you are suddenly flush with cash. Fortune 500 companies make a lot of small software purchases.

I think it is reasonable to expect your hosting provider won't randomly shut down your account...twice.

Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#44

Post by nhooyr »

A few years ago I used to run a VPS on DO with a mail server, VPN and some code I was writing. Once I was done with everything, I used their snapshots feature to backup my VPS and shut it down.

Two years later I wanted to restore the VPS but turns out my snapshot become "outdated" and they stopped supporting the format for restoration... Support was completely useless, wouldn't even let me download the snapshot, said at most they could mount it into a new VPS and I could recover the data myself.

Very unprofessional.

Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#45

Post by awalton »

Hamuko wrote: post #19
ziddoap wrote: post #7

An expensive lesson learned in redundancy. It's a shame to see things play out this way, but sometimes a lesson is taught in a brutal fashion. I imagine the author will be more careful in the future regarding off-site backups, additional technical partners, contingency plans, etc.

There's a pretty hard cap on the level of redundancy you can do with a two-man company, as I assume a two-man company does not bring in a lot of money.

Yeah maybe, but not having an offsite backup is asking for trouble. They just failed to consider that "their site" == "digital ocean's cloud", and that since it's someone else's computers, they could easily be locked out at any time for any dumb reason including this one.

An expensive lesson to learn to take and check backups regularly.

Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#46

Post by mountainofdeath »

You know, there is usually an easy way to mitigate this. When you create an account, be sure to supply business information e.g EIN in the USA and see if you can do invoice billing. Once you get set-up as a business, most providers assume you know what you are doing.

These sorts of things tend to slip through the cracks. If you are running is a business capacity, make sure you treat everything like any other business would.

Even as a two-man company, you can't afford the cost and potential liability of not operating as a registered business. It also shows that this is a serious business and not a hobby.

Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#47

Post by busterarm »

sasasassy wrote: post #26
atonse wrote: post #6

I’m certainly getting downvoted for this. Not at all trying to blame the original posters and victims: While they seem great for hobbyist and small business sites, there’s no way I’d trust Fortune 500 client business to something like DigitalOcean. I just don’t see the benefits over a more established operation like AWS, Azure or GCP. Saving $50 here and there isn’t worth it.

Your "established operations" are more expensive and GCP is newer than DO. Plus, getting the attention of someone to restore your account is probably easier in DO than in a faceless giant company like Amazon, Microsoft or Google.

My AWS support tickets usually get answered in two minutes or less and I have a dedicated rep who I can call whenever I want and we have regular check-ins anyway.

You get what you pay for. We're even upgrading from this support plan to an Enterprise account.

Startups can usually get enough in AWS credits that they probably could have their entire first year of service _for free_.

Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#48

Post by markbnj »

Hamuko wrote: post #19
ziddoap wrote: post #7

An expensive lesson learned in redundancy. It's a shame to see things play out this way, but sometimes a lesson is taught in a brutal fashion. I imagine the author will be more careful in the future regarding off-site backups, additional technical partners, contingency plans, etc.

There's a pretty hard cap on the level of redundancy you can do with a two-man company, as I assume a two-man company does not bring in a lot of money.

Agreed but having some backups on a different platform and a fallback plan for deploying somewhere else should be doable.

Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#50

Post by StudentStuff »

ziddoap wrote: post #22
Hamuko wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a pretty hard cap on the level of redundancy you can do with a two-man company, as I assume a two-man company does not bring in a lot of money.

The number of employees shouldn't be the deciding factor when you are a tech company that apparently has fortune 500 companies as customers. I'm not talking 5 9's redundancy. I'm talking grab a backup once a week or something, anything, to help mitigate a scenario like this. According to the thread, they lost ~1 year of data. That should be unfeasible to a company serving customers, let alone Fortune 500 customers. D…

Plenty of one man companies have Fortune 500 customers. Most are ran like the startup in question, as basic disaster mitigation is overhead. Don't expect the world from one guy keeping a company afloat, unless you enjoy disappointment.
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