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"DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

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Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#541

Post by justforyou »

unilynx wrote: post #339
nodesocket wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This headline is grossly misleading and very clickbaity "Killed our company". It's not exactly big business that you scale up to 10 droplets for short bursts, I am willing to bet their spend on DigitalOcean is less than $500 a month, yet the author is expecting enterprise support. DigitalOcean should go the route of AWS and kill off free support completely and offer paid support plans. Something like $49 a month or 1…

They’re working on that and were sending out surveys a couple of weeks ago whether customers would be interested. They had a slightly higher minimum amount in mind for premier support You already get bumped to a higher tier of support once you hit 500/month spend for no additional fees but that just gives you promises for lower response times

I'm done using DO.

It's usually a bad sign when a company can't meet current needs/expectations and then decides to try and productize their failures.

Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#542

Post by holdenc »

BinaryArcher wrote: post #187

This exact same thing happened to me last year. I accessed my account abroad and they perma banned me. Support was useless and even with evidence did not believe who I was. I then somehow convinced them to give me temp access, which in my opinion is even worse. They didn't believe me about who I was and then gave me temporary access to an account. DO can't be trusted when their support team could so easily be sociall…

Obviously concerning. Care you provide more details on this? I respect your desire to stay anon, but any details to add some color would be great. For example, did you completely leave Digital Ocean, and if so, where did you go?

Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#543

Post by justforyou »

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…

>> and we take every effort to get customers back online as quickly as possible. In this particular scenario, we were slow to respond and had missteps in handling the false positive.

You clearly don't make every effort, and did not -- so why waste the extra verbiage and switch from active to passive voice?

Based on your cliche response I have zero confidence that DO will do anything substantial to address the root causes of the issue.

Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#544

Post by efficax »

pgm8705 wrote: post #34
jressey wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is obvious. Start your app on Digital Ocean or Heroku, and when it becomes a viable business get that shit on a grown up platform.

I can't speak on Digital Ocean and I guess it depends how you define "viable" but I've been running my upper six-figure revenue business on Heroku with tremendous success over the past 6 years. Customer support is super responsive and very helpful. The minimal downtime I've faced had has largely been the fault of AWS.

Heroku is expensive but fantastic. Unless you have complicated needs and the price point doesn’t shock you, it’s a fantastic way to use AWS while sparing yourself a lot of headaches.

Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#545

Post by fernandotakai »

username90 wrote: post #534
thaumaturgy wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're arguing here against something I didn't say. You took one word from my statement -- "illiterate" -- and built a whole new argument around it which was never mine to begin with. I don't think you're doing it intentionally, I suspect it's just because you have a particular sensitivity on this subject. Either way I don't think I can say anything here that'll get a fair treatment from you.

Not that person, but you said this: > 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. That statement reeks of ignorance. It seems you have almost no experience with other languages than your own, or you would know that communicating while being non-fluent or with a non-fluent works just…

this statement is downright offensive and something i wouldn't expect to read here.

fluency is a high barrier to clear. it took me 5 years of speaking/reading/writing english daily to come even close to "fluency".

before that, i had a really good advanced english, but i wasn't fluent. and it didn't mean i was "illiterate".

Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#546

Post by znpy »

hackermailman wrote: post #301
znpy wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have interviewed with DO and they tried diverting me towards a support position. They told me that on a single day a support engineer was supposed to help/advice customers on pretty much whatever the customer was having issue with and also handle something between 80-120 tickets per day. It's nice to see that DO is willing to help on pretty much anything they (read: their team) has knowledge about, but with 80-120…

I once worked for eBay a long time ago, and support consisted of 4 concurrent chats, offering pre-programmed macros often pointing to terribly written documentation the person had already read and was confused about. If you took the time to actually assist somebody you were chastised in a weekly review where they went over your chat support. The person doing mine told me I had the highest satisfaction record in the e…

> imho you should have taken the support position and schemed your way into development internally

> This was my plan at eBay before they fired me

I guess you answered yourself.

Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#547

Post by thaumaturgy »

username90 wrote: post #534
thaumaturgy wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're arguing here against something I didn't say. You took one word from my statement -- "illiterate" -- and built a whole new argument around it which was never mine to begin with. I don't think you're doing it intentionally, I suspect it's just because you have a particular sensitivity on this subject. Either way I don't think I can say anything here that'll get a fair treatment from you.

Not that person, but you said this: > 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. That statement reeks of ignorance. It seems you have almost no experience with other languages than your own, or you would know that communicating while being non-fluent or with a non-fluent works just…

> Sometimes misunderstandings happens and it can be a bit slower but that is all.

So your position is that support that's a bit slower, with some misunderstandings, is exactly as good as fast support without misunderstandings, even in downtime-sensitive applications.

Well, okay then.

Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#548

Post by jjoonathan »

tialaramex wrote: post #504
hackermailman wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I once worked for eBay a long time ago, and support consisted of 4 concurrent chats, offering pre-programmed macros often pointing to terribly written documentation the person had already read and was confused about. If you took the time to actually assist somebody you were chastised in a weekly review where they went over your chat support. The person doing mine told me I had the highest satisfaction record in the e…

It remains weird to me that this even _can_ work as a business strategy. Customers know this isn't right, so they are only staying with a business that does this for so long as it is the absolutely cheapest/ only way to achieve what they want. That's super high risk, because if a competitor undercuts you, or an alternative appears, you are going to lose all those customers pretty much instantly. Almost invariably the…

"Abuse your customers and get away with it because they aren't good at punishing you" is the status quo in a depressing fraction of companies.

Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#549

Post by ethbro »

zeta0134 wrote: post #335
hackermailman wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I once worked for eBay a long time ago, and support consisted of 4 concurrent chats, offering pre-programmed macros often pointing to terribly written documentation the person had already read and was confused about. If you took the time to actually assist somebody you were chastised in a weekly review where they went over your chat support. The person doing mine told me I had the highest satisfaction record in the e…

I'm fortunate that my own company (Rackspace) at least has a level head about this sort of thing. My direct manager looks at my numbers (~60-80 interactions per month) and my colleagues (many hundreds of interactions per month) and correctly observes that we have different strengths, and that's the end of the discussion. I have a tendency to take my time and go deep on issues, and my coworkers will send me tickets th…

Support should be looked at as a profit center, but almost everyone tries to run it like a cost center.

It's crazy that companies spend $$ on marketing and sales, then cheap out on a interaction with someone who is already interested in / using their product.

Re: "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"

#550

Post by scarface74 »

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…

That’s all well and good. But how do you plan to reimburse your customer for this gross negligence? I have never heard of such incompetence or lack of communications from anyone on AWS’s business support plan. Why should anyone trust DO over AWS or Azure?
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