Comment by celticmusic
6 years ago
I had an incident similar to this with linode, which is why I use and recommend Digital Ocean nowadays.
My machine going away because you had hardware issues isn't my problem, and I'll spend my money on a more competent company.
I had the exact same experience on Digital Ocean. Attempted to resize a VPS, the process got stuck for eternity, and support tells me all data is lost.
Always have your own offsite backups.
To be clear, disk corruption can happen anywhere due to many reasons, in particular when VM disks map to local disks on an hypervisor, which gives you fast SSDs without network latency. Probably that the resize command had an issue and corrupted the image on disk. Then there's not much that can done aside from restoring from a backup. Having had backups enabled on the droplets, they would in all likelihood not have been corrupted since backups with DigitalOcean are stored offsite. In such case they could have been used to restore the droplet.
In some extreme cases, a concert of bad luck may coincides to ruin things despite multiple levels of redundancies. But that's extremely rare, especially nowadays. However DO is much larger now than it used to be, so the odds of hearing about extreme accidents increase.
disclaimer: I used to work there.
When I worked at the WordPress hosting division of Copyblogger, we always had issues like these with Digital Ocean. They would email us saying that the node had a problem, and we had to recreate the server on our own.
Good thing we only kept caching servers in Digital Ocean, so those were easily recreated, but that always kept me away from DO, personally.
In fairness to them, though, DO do not claim to keep backup of the servers, as far as I know.
DO has a service to automate backups. You can't download them or snapshots though, so you if you want a off-server copy you have to do it yourself.