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Comment by atonse | Hacker News Reader

I’m certainly getting downvoted for this.

Not at all trying to blame the original posters and victims:

While they seem great for hobbyist and small business sites, there’s no way I’d trust Fortune 500 client business to something like DigitalOcean. I just don’t see the benefits over a more established operation like AWS, Azure or GCP. Saving $50 here and there isn’t worth it.

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DigitalOcean is established. They're newer than GCP and about the same age as Azure, and IIRC at one point were the second largest VPS provider, second only to AWS.

And unfortunately this stuff happens to your "established" examples as well. Here [1] is a particular example of Google shutting down an entire GCP account with no explanation. Some comments report the same on AWS as well. Ironically, people in that HN thread are actually suggesting Vultr (kinda like DO, but even smaller) as a good alternative.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17431609

We rely almost exclusively on DigitalOcean and the stories about Google shutting down accounts really gives me pause. It's not an isolated incident either, and raising support is next to impossible, so I hear.

I'm lucky enough that my spend with DO is high enough to qualify for support, so if this ever happened to me at least I know I'd get a couple chances to make things right

Were this to happen on GCP I'm fairly certain they'd just black hole my account since I'm spare change to them.

I think it's the opposite. The cofounder intervened and the access was restored. This would never happen with Google or Amazon -- once they lock you out, your entire business is permabanned, and you won't be able to reach any human with authority to help you.

Maybe - AWS at least, you'll have an account rep to bang on whose job it is to remove obstacles to your spending more. I'm not sure how big exactly you have to be to get an account rep, but my small company with only 50 instances has one.

Your "established operations" are more expensive and GCP is newer than DO. Plus, getting the attention of someone to restore your account is probably easier in DO than in a faceless giant company like Amazon, Microsoft or Google.

My AWS support tickets usually get answered in two minutes or less and I have a dedicated rep who I can call whenever I want and we have regular check-ins anyway.

You get what you pay for. We're even upgrading from this support plan to an Enterprise account.

Startups can usually get enough in AWS credits that they probably could have their entire first year of service _for free_.

I've worked with AWS for years, first as a small insignificant customer and later as a large customer. Their support team was very fast in both cases.

AWS support is a lot more responsive even if you are not a big source of revenue. One time when I had an issue, I directly reached out to our startup program point of contact and they made sure everything was resolved by constantly following up with the interval team responsible and keeping me in the loop

You Get What You Pay For.

Yes, this is a bad look for DO. But the way they're able to beat AWS on price includes things like "worse support." And if AWS goes out of business, you'll know in advance. DO isn't the same story. You should be planning for redundancy if DO is truly business critical for you.

Just because you have fortune 500 clients doesn't mean you are suddenly flush with cash. Fortune 500 companies make a lot of small software purchases.

I think it is reasonable to expect your hosting provider won't randomly shut down your account...twice.

To be blunt I've heard of GCP doing this to other people before. AWS and Azure though both understand that customer service is extremely important, and shutting down services destroys confidence. In the case of them suspecting malicious activity they'd have actual security people look at what's happening, and then maybe blackhole their traffic while they start calling people.

After even a single incident like this no sane company would relay on DigitalOcean. This is the kind of crap you expect from a shared web host overselling resources, not from a company that wants to provide infrastructure to tech companies.

That was true a long time ago, but recently DO has also proven to be a professional cloud hosting provider in the same league. Frankly, I was expecting the same level of support/service as AWS from them.

BTW, I don't even see a downvote button around posts, there is only upvote button! Is it because I'm new here?

You need a certain number of points before you can see the downvote or flag options.

Yup, you need 500+ karma to downvote (and you can't downvote responses to your own post)

Thanks for the info, have an upvote!

You can only downvote once your own comments have been upvoted a bit.

Keep in mind though that you should only downvote for abusive comments (which also deserve a flag), gross misinformation, or other things like that. Disagreeing with someone is not a good reason to downvote.

And even when you use "mature" cloud, use another one for your backups.

(I'm not trying to blame author of that tweet, we all make mistakes and I think DO should give access to backups even when account is locked)

>Saving $50 here and there isn’t worth it.

I don't think you realize how big is the price difference between AWS/GCP/Azure and old-school VPS providers like DO, Hetzner or OVH.

Conversely, I don't see how a company like DO can afford to offload their customer support to automation for these "we'll shut down your business" kinds of tickets. Tweets like these generate a lot of press.

See, you totally can run big stuff DO (or Vultr or whatever). It just takes 20 minutes on the phone to make sure they know they can be paid when the time comes.

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.

According to the thread the company is 2 people.

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.

Couldn't agree more! We've been using Heroku at ReadMe for ~5 years and it is easily my favorite piece of technology we use. Off the top of my head I can't think of a single issue that entire time that has been their fault.

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.

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