I will follow up with a long post documenting timeline etc and all correspondence with them (it's not that much since they never respond). I have been a (paying) DigitalOcean user for more than 2 years for personal projects, and recently convinced a start-up that I work for in Tokyo to move off of Heroku and onto Digital Ocean. Everything fine for 2 months, then all of a sudden I get user reports that the site is down. I check and my account is locked and all it says is to submit a support ticket. No warnings of an issue, not even a mail saying that they turned off instances etc, just silently they lock my account. I submit a ticket and they don't resopnd for a week, I submit another, finally after 5 weeks, yes 5 weeks, I get a response saying that I login from too many locations and the lock is now removed, but they destroyed all instances. How can this even be anything close to standard practice to without warning destroy all instances of a paying user for over 2 years?! All databases everything completely gone forever. I guess this goes to show why you should always not trust 1 cloud provider, but this is just so incredible to me that they can on a whim without warning or justification just destroy all your data, is there any legal recourse against this?
Ask HN: DigitalOcean Destroyed All My Data, Any Legal Recourse?
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Re: Ask HN: DigitalOcean Destroyed All My Data, Any Legal Recourse?
#2If the contract (terms of service) you agreed to with the provider says they can nuke your data without notifying you, there may be nothing you can do. If the contract doesn't allow them to do that, you could consult a lawyer to see if this constitutes a breach of contract or negligence. (But if the contract has a forced arbitration clause, you won't be able to sue them.)
In any case, this is a horrible thing for a business to do to a paying customer.
Re: Ask HN: DigitalOcean Destroyed All My Data, Any Legal Recourse?
#3Sure, you can always sue. I have no idea what your chance of winning is, though.
I want to caution other commenters that many of these stories have turned out to not be what they first appear.
Re: Ask HN: DigitalOcean Destroyed All My Data, Any Legal Recourse?
#4There certainly is. You can sue them. I bet you'd lose, though.
In my opinion you lost your data because you didn't make backups.
Re: Ask HN: DigitalOcean Destroyed All My Data, Any Legal Recourse?
#5There certainly is. You can sue them. I bet you'd lose, though. In my opinion you lost your data because you didn't make backups.
Oh, I did have backups luckily off of DigitalOcean (I will have full details in my post), but I have a huge problem with them marketing how great they are to startups and having a backups product that they sell (and also nuked). Any company that does this is not worth dealing with IMO.
Re: Ask HN: DigitalOcean Destroyed All My Data, Any Legal Recourse?
#6I'm not a lawyer. The TOSs I've seen, not specifically the digital ocean TOS but in general, usually limit the liability to the amount the service costs. If that's the case you might get credited a month.
But laws are really complicated and I don't even attempt to understand them.
Re: Ask HN: DigitalOcean Destroyed All My Data, Any Legal Recourse?
#7There certainly is. You can sue them. I bet you'd lose, though. In my opinion you lost your data because you didn't make backups.
Oh, I did have backups luckily off of DigitalOcean (I will have full details in my post), but I have a huge problem with them marketing how great they are to startups and having a backups product that they sell (and also nuked). Any company that does this is not worth dealing with IMO.
They are great for startups because you can automate everything. You can delete everything and restore from 0 without needing manually run commands.
Treat it as a temporary server that can disappear at any time, have automated backups and streaming database replication, then have an automated restore script that you test periodically.
If the server goes down, restore somewhere else.
Re: Ask HN: DigitalOcean Destroyed All My Data, Any Legal Recourse?
#8すごいね?
Re: Ask HN: DigitalOcean Destroyed All My Data, Any Legal Recourse?
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh, I did have backups luckily off of DigitalOcean (I will have full details in my post), but I have a huge problem with them marketing how great they are to startups and having a backups product that they sell (and also nuked). Any company that does this is not worth dealing with IMO.
They are great for startups because you can automate everything. You can delete everything and restore from 0 without needing manually run commands. Treat it as a temporary server that can disappear at any time, have automated backups and streaming database replication, then have an automated restore script that you test periodically. If the server goes down, restore somewhere else.
You have to have a data layer stored somewhere, are you saying to not store it on digital ocean? All this is a moot point when they destroy your instances and lock your account...
Re: Ask HN: DigitalOcean Destroyed All My Data, Any Legal Recourse?
#10Are we going to find the Boston Bomber next?