<begin quote> Hey Matthew,
I'm Zach, Director of Support here at DigitalOcean. Thanks for raising this topic.
I was able to locate your account, and I see that I was the one who granted the credit and followed up via email. I hadn't heard back from you until now, and I'm happy that we have an open line of communication. I'm hopeful that this thread starts a conversation, that it clarifies what steps we take, and we might even uncover a different solution that works well for everyone.
To start with, I want to be really clear, this is the absolute worst case scenario. I absolutely don't want it to happen to any customer, let alone someone who has been with us for such a long time. There's really a delicate balance that we must strike between customers who forget to pay and customers who do not want to pay.
Currently, our notifications for overdue balances are sent via email. If a customer account is unpaid on the first of the month, we send ~15 emails total notifying the customer of the situation, and subsequently power off servers 21 days after the account is on hold as a further way to gain your attention. At this time, droplets are removed from your account 14 days following power off, which is an increased amount of time from what you experienced. It was increased from 3 days based on past user feedback.
Why do we do it this way? In the past, we had no hold or suspension process for non-payment, which enabled bad actors to run for months and months without paying. From a business perspective, we made a decision to put a scalable process in place that limited how long an account could go unpaid.
As a support team and business, we are always willing to work with our customers who are unable to pay. We are always available via ticket, our contact form, and have made wide-ranging attempts to help users who aren't able to pay due to banking regulations: https://insidedigitalocean.com...
I'd like some input, so I'll publicly ask for feedback on questions that I've asked privately before. I'd also like any other feedback that we can consider on how to make this a more positive experience for everyone
-Knowing that we do not do phone support, what's the best way to notify you of a past-due balance? -Is SMS effective at times like this?
I would love to hear your thoughts.
Thank you, Zach zach@digitalocean.com