There's a pretty hard cap on the level of redundancy you can do with a two-man company, as I assume a two-man company does not bring in a lot of money.
I'm not talking 5 9's redundancy. I'm talking grab a backup once a week or something, anything, to help mitigate a scenario like this. According to the thread, they lost ~1 year of data. That should be unfeasible to a company serving customers, let alone Fortune 500 customers.
Disaster recovery planning is key for a technical company to succeed. It is clear they never considered a scenario where there DO account would be closed/compromised/down.
I don't think the chance of DigitalOcean automatically freezing your account to a point where only a co-founder can do something about it has been well publicised.
A contingency plan should ideally have been in place for a scenario where, regardless of root cause, you have lost access to your DO account.
Given their size, that is extremely unlikely to happen without warning.
Imagine you are a customer of this company. Would you be rallying to their defense, "backups aren't needed because the scenarios are unlikely", or would you be angry that the company had zero contingency planning and lost all of your data (or the data you rely upon)?
If you can honestly say, as a (hypothetical) customer of the company in the thread, that you wouldn't care if a company you relied upon has no disaster recovery planning, more power to you. I, however, like to make sure that the companies I'm relying on have some sort of contingency that protects me as a customer.
An expensive lesson to learn to take and check backups regularly.
It won't be entirely up to date when the worst case happens, you'll be unavailable and you'll probably have lost a day of data or so, but you won't have lost everything.
Rclone to AWS or Google or whatever is easy to set up, add a daily dump of your database to the folder you back up. Unless you handle a lot of data, costs are probably not a big factor.
Even the database replication is mostly setup and forget these days. Very reliable.
And they already did backups. It's just they did them to the wrong (same service) host.
Clearly they should be charging more.
Stuff like this is relatively simple when you are trying to learn it, but keeping it operation is hard at a small level. Is the less to really use PaaS until it's viable for you to be running a small K8s cluster, or equivalent fleet? Seems really expensive compared to VPSes, but having better guides might help.