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"DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

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Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#51

Post by [deleted] »

tracker1 wrote: post #29
blacksmith_tb wrote: post #4

I have happily used DO for small things, like hosting a Ghost blog, or running an Algo VPN, but I am a little surprised to see people doing bigger infrastructure with them - not that they deserve to lose everything for making that choice, but it seems like it would have been clearly riskier than AWS/GC/Azure?

I'm surprised that people put significantly more faith into GCP, AWS, Azure etc... similar things have happened in lots of scenarios. Not to mention when registrars have taken down sites. This is a shame, and imho it sucks a lot. One of my biggest points of paranoia are with backups and scripting a return of a site on another provider should the worst happen. Getting ready to launch something barely more than a hobby…

[deleted]

Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#54

Post by scarejunba »

zbobet2012 wrote: post #32
ookblah wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that last response from them is pretty damning. it's like what happens when your customer success turns off their brain and just applies blanket rules to everything. yikes, just when i thought their kubernetes and managed db's were looking attractive...

They are, just don't rely one _one_ service. You need to be cloud agnostic and this is why.

Strong anti-recommendation for this advice. The cost in dev time plus keeping things running is not worth it. This is a rare event. Just use a more well-established cloud service.

Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#55

Post by mountainofdeath »

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.

See, you totally can run big stuff DO (or Vultr or whatever). It just takes 20 minutes on the phone to make sure they know they can be paid when the time comes.

Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#56

Post by rdevsrex »

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.

True, but it isn’t hard to add S3 as an additional backup destination. Ideally if they had their infrastructure setup as code, it would have made recovery possible.

Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#57

Post by el_programmador »

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.

That was true a long time ago, but recently DO has also proven to be a professional cloud hosting provider in the same league. Frankly, I was expecting the same level of support/service as AWS from them.

BTW, I don't even see a downvote button around posts, there is only upvote button! Is it because I'm new here?

Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#58

Post by twblalock »

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.

I've worked with AWS for years, first as a small insignificant customer and later as a large customer. Their support team was very fast in both cases.

Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#59

Post by txcwpalpha »

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.

DigitalOcean is established. They're newer than GCP and about the same age as Azure, and IIRC at one point were the second largest VPS provider, second only to AWS.

And unfortunately this stuff happens to your "established" examples as well. Here [1] is a particular example of Google shutting down an entire GCP account with no explanation. Some comments report the same on AWS as well. Ironically, people in that HN thread are actually suggesting Vultr (kinda like DO, but even smaller) as a good alternative.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17431609

Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#60

Post by StudentStuff »

busterarm wrote: post #41
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.

Hmm, I've done lots of stuff on OVH that other hosts consider abusive, with nary a word of complaint from OVH. OVH seems to have this whole automation thing down cold, monitoring boxes for dying components and letting me run hog wild on their VMs without limit...

The one time I used their phone support, the guy I got was fairly helpful. They seem like a hands off company overall.

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