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"DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

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Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#471

Post by AYBABTME »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #444
cannonedhamster wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 staf…

I know many engineers who are not that fluent in English whom you would never contemplate qualifying as illiterate; you would quickly see that (1) they're encumbered by English and (2) are obviously extremely proficient technically, and literate.

People who would make gratuitous grammatical mistakes but have read more classics than the average American college graduate. I can easily count many just thinking of it.

Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#472

Post by hinkley »

cptskippy wrote: post #241

Let me see if I get this straight... Developer has a Python script that takes 1 second per record to execute and he has 500,00 records to process, so he spins up 10 distinct VMs each running the same Python script to parallelize the task. The provider shuts him down and cites a section of the EULA that says "You shall not take any action that imposes an unreasonable... load on our infrastructure." Basically saying "H…

I get hives when I hear people porting all of their stuff to one cloud provider so they can get rid of their server rooms.

Are we getting to a point yet where that’s considered to be suicidal? I hope so.

Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#473

Post by [deleted] »

9HZZRfNlpR wrote: post #460
bcooks wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the replies. Let me try to address a few of the things I have seen here. We haven't completed our investigation yet which will include details on the timeline, decisions made by our systems, our people, and our plans to address where we fell short. That said, I want to provide some information now rather than waiting for our full post-mortem analysis. A combination of factors, not just the usage patterns,…

What do you recommend your clients to do if that kind of mistake happens to them? Is Twitter-shaming the only way out? I know people say some legal arguments why they close you down and won't say anything, but this is the worst scenario ever. I'd be better off excused at something I didn't do than just ooops we can't tell you anything, your account has been shut down.

[deleted]

Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#474

Post by thanatos_dem »

isoprophlex wrote: post #465
thanatos_dem wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any response that would satisfy you?

It's been 7 hours, some follow up answers would be nice...

7 hours, on a Friday night in the headquarters time zone. This issue is resolved and is clearly not wide spread, so does getting a response on Monday or Tuesday vs right now make any difference?

Companies are made of people. Let the people have a life. Their night is shitty enough as is after this, I guarantee you.

Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#475

Post by pushpop »

Not excusing DO here but there’s also a lesson to be learned about backups: make sure they’re kept off site in case the whole site itself because compromised. Usually when we say this we mean in terms of a physical disaster (eg fire) but in this case it’s also in case of a logical disaster (account getting shit down).

So the lesson is don’t leave your backups with the same cloud provider that host your database. You should also pull local copies as well

Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#476

Post by z3t4 »

_bxg1 wrote: post #275
z3t4 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having backups in two places could easily triple the hosting costs. The question is what costs more. Eg. Losing data vs backup costs.

Most of the costs aren't from storage space, but compute power. We aren't talking about duplicating the whole infrastructure, just backing up the data . Disk space is dirt cheap. Also, by "two places" I meant the live DB and one backup that's somewhere completely different. My wording may have been confusing.

They did have backups. Thats why I asumed you meant double backups. If you do cold storage you should have 3 copies due to possible corruptions. Sure tape drives are cheap but someone also have to run and check the backups.

Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#477

Post by jwilk »

bdcravens wrote: post #268
SirensOfTitan wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The developer is a 2 person team. Why would they use multiple clouds at that stage? Additionally, if 10 spun up VMs is considered an “unreasonable” load on DigitalOcean infrastructure I shutter at the concept of building anything on the service. Does DigitalOcean even define “unreasonable” in their terms or is it kept vague?

My understanding is that it isn't the 10 VMs as much as the resource usage (my suspicion is that DO is running a lot closer to the margin that larger providers, so they police this more). So they probably pegged all the CPUs at 100%. (perhaps a message queue approach would have been easier on the resources)

What's wrong with pegging all the CPUs at 100%?

Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#478

Post by EugeneOZ »

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…

It's just greed, not some wisdom. When data is lost - it's just lost. Maybe AWS will pay some compensation because of their promises, but money not always can solve problems of missing data.

Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#480

Post by EugeneOZ »

ksec wrote: post #178
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…

And Linode has always had faster CPU, I/O, Network. And lots of small things like that DO only catches up in the recent years, like pooled bandwidth. Although these days I tend to go with UpCloud, it is very similar to Linode and DO, except you can do custom instances like 20x vCPU with 1GB Memory, spin it up for $0.23 an hour. Compared to standard plan on Linode and DO, 20 vCPU with 96GB Memory would be $0.72/Hr.

I love Linode, their support is awesome, their CPUs on "Dedicated CPU Plans" are great (by benchmarks - similar to GCP n1 CPU), disks io bandwidth just amazing. But I had to leave them because their network is not so reliable. It was difficult decision and I tried to return few weeks ago (because I really love them), but again network in London was just not so great.
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