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"DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

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Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#441

Post by api »

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…

Vultr is underrated too. I've had nothing but positive tech support experiences with them. Their weird branding turns people off but they do not seem fly by night. We have used them for various things for years with very few problems.

Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#442

Post by Blackthorn »

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…

Ten years ago, I had a pretty reasonable $10/mo account, that I eventually moved to a $20/mo account because I needed more resources to keep up with traffic.

I'd expect that, as more transistors have been packed blah blah blah, that such a $10/mo account would have gotten better, not worse, since then.

Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#443

Post by jen20 »

cannonedhamster wrote: post #400
AYBABTME wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

Not least England, which is literally full of actual native English speakers, and 8 hours ahead of the west coast of the USA.

Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#444

Post by thaumaturgy »

cannonedhamster wrote: post #400
AYBABTME wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

I probably should have left the word "overseas" out of my initial comment, it gave it a flavor that doesn't match my left-wing multicultural globalist ideals.

That said, I disagree wholeheartedly that it's okay for support staff to not be completely fluent in the language they're providing support in, regardless of the language.

There is functionally no difference between trying to interact with talented support staff who aren't fluent in your language, and trying to interact with illiterate support staff. The end results are identical.

There are people who are very talented and very fluent in more than one language. Those people tend to be more expensive. So, many companies forego hiring those workers and instead hire others who are cheaper and "about as good". My multiple experiences with DO support have suggested that that's what they're doing.

As other commenters are suggesting, it may just be instead that DO is expecting its support staff to meet metrics that are causing them to spend only a minute or two per ticket and send out scripted replies.

Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#445

Post by jameshilliard »

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…

Are you aware that Viasat has blacklisted a huge amount of Digitalocean /24 subnets? I can't access many of my servers when I'm on a satellite connection in addition to other websites hosted on Digitalocean. I've talked with the Viasat NOC and they told me they were blocking Digitalocean subnets due malware.

Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#446

Post by jjeaff »

ndiscussion wrote: post #119
wpietri wrote: post #82

Does anybody know what they actually do? I dug around to find a Wayback version that actually had text. I understand the words on their own, but when put together I get nothing: https://web.archive.org/web/20181030015237/https://raisup.co...

Typo on the front page, how you do one thing is how you do everything. >powerfull

Ya ya, and sometimes a small typo just slips through.

Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#447

Post by cavisne »

Bookmarking this for next time there's a HN comment "why is Netflix using AWS, they should just get some cheap VPS's from DO"

The rise of the public cloud is pretty fortunate for companies like DO, they can make the same assumptions that legacy VPS companies did (most vm's sit idle so oversell them massively, most customers will create a single vm and nothing else) while branding themselves as having the same strong infrastructure as AWS.

Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#448

Post by Spivak »

Johnny555 wrote: post #433
lelanthran wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"you're responsible for doing all your own offsite backups" That's going to be true no matter which cloud provider you choose. Their ToS almost certainly include terms which allow them to kick you off and refund any monies for any reason whatsoever. Good luck if you bought into their entire ecosystem and can't move elsewhere on a whim.

That's going to be true no matter which cloud provider you choose My company provides services to fortune 100 companies, and we host literally petabytes of data on their behalf in Amazon S3, but we don't have offsite backups. We (and they) rely on Amazon's durability promise. We do offer the option of replicating their data to another cloud provider, but few customers use that service -- few companies want to pay ove…

For AWS it doesn't make a lot of sense to protect against AWS itself losing data since you're paying them a premium for that. Backups in this model would be logically separated so a user/programmer error can't wipe out the only copy of your production dataset.

Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#449

Post by iamaelephant »

rdiddly wrote: post #343
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…

You've got an additional problem though, which is that this tells us you have two support channels: one that doesn't work (i.e. yours, the one you built), and one that does (Twitter-shaming). The first channel represents how you act when no one's watching; the second, how you act when they are. Most people prefer to deal with people for whom those two are the same.

I think it says a lot that this CTO joker flew in, regurgitated the standard-issue "we will endeavor to do better" apology and left without answering any of the very legitimate follow-up questions. I would never deal with an organisation that behaves like these guys.

Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#450

Post by sbov »

shuzchen wrote: post #87

If you're reading this and concerned for your own backup story, fret not! In 2019 secure off-premise backups are super easy to implement, even for a 1 person shop. Get something like Restic or Borg or any one of the enumerated options here: https://github.com/restic/others I've recently implemented backups with Restic, the static binary and plethora of supported storage backends was extremely appealing. The easiest s…

Note that you can also use Backblaze's B2 cloud storage with Restic. It's pretty cheap and was easy for me to configure.
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