← Back to context

Comment by 3np

5 years ago

I'm with you on the rest, but what has DO done to not have the benefit of doubt?

Also, to your point, an organization becomes something else than the sum of its parts, especially the bigger it gets.

Google can be a malicious actor without necessarily having individuals make act maliciously.

3 comments

3np

Reply
freedomben  5 years ago

Yeah that's a fair question. I had a bad personal experience with them, but I've also seen plenty of issues too. There was a big one a little while ago about how Digital Ocean destroyed somebody's entire company by banning them with AI: https://twitter.com/w3Nicolas/status/1134529316904153089

In their defense they acknowledged it and some changes. I can't find the blog post now so going from memory. But that only happened because he got lucky and it blew up on HN/twitter and got the attention of leadership at DO. How many people have beenh destroyed in silence?

In my case, Digital Ocean only allows one payment card at a time and my customer (for whom the services were running) provided me with a card that was charged directly.

A couple months later my customer forgot that he had provided the card. He didn't recognizer "Digital Ocean" and thought he had been hacked (which has happened to him before) and called the bank and placed a chargeback.

When DO got the charge back they emailed me and also completely locked my account so I was totally unable to access the UI or API. I didn't find out about the locked account until the next day. I responded to the email immediately, and called my customer, who apologized and called the bank to reverse the chargeback. I was as responsive as they could have asked for.

The next day I needed to open a port in the firewall for a developer to do some work. I was greeted with the dreaded "account logged" screen. I emailed them begging and pleading with them to unblock my account. They responded that they would not unlock the account until the chargeback reversal had cleared. Research showed that it can take weeks for that to happen.

I emailed again explaining that this was totally unacceptable. It is not ok to have to tell your client "yeah sorry I can't open that firewall port for your developer because my account is locked. Might be a couple of weeks." After a day or so, they finally responded and unlocked my account. Fortunately they didn't terminate my droplets, but I wonder what would have happened if I had already started using object storage as I had been planning. This was all over about $30 by the way.

After that terrifying experience, I decided staying on DO was just too risky. Linode's pricing is nearly identical and they have mostly the same features. Prior to launching my new infrastructure I emailed their support asking about their policy. They do not lock accounts unless the person is long-term unresponsive or has a history of abuse.

I've talked with Linode support several times and they've always been great. They're my go to now.

  • 3np  5 years ago

    I see where you're coming from. I've also had a bad experience with DO (CC arbitrarily blocked them which ended up with my droplets getting terminated and all data and backups wiped). That was at least as much an error on my part, though.

    It does seem that they're unfortunately borrowing the playbook from AWS/Azure/GCP wrt over-automization as they scale. More old-school support could have been their differentiator, but it seems they're going for growth. They're getting close to the razor's edge.