Comment by xnxn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by xnxn | Hacker News Reader

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Counter-anecdote slash venting:

I recently logged into my long-dormant DO account to kick the tires on their now-GA managed Kubernetes service and to contribute some CPU cycles to a distributed computing project I'm interested in (not cryptocurrency, I swear).

I first requested and was approved for a droplet limit increase (to 25). I started 20 nodes, deployed my very CPU intensive workload, and 12 hours later my account was locked and my nodes all went NotReady.

I immediately replied to the abuse ticket explaining my usage. 4 days later, my account was unlocked and received the "allow high CPU" flag... but they billed me for the nodes as if they had been running that whole time. I asked for a credit (5 days ago) and they haven't replied yet. Probably a little busy over there right now.

So... I'm not too thrilled with DO. I get that cryptocurrency ruined everything, but this has been a frustrating experience and I'm glad I was only using it for a pet project.

Hey xnxn - Thanks for raising this issue. I'm Zach, Director of Support at DO. Please send me an email with your account detalis, first name at, and I'll take care of this.

Thanks Zach, will do.

Email received, followed up on, and account credited.

-Zach

Really? What is so bad about your support that you needed to hear about this from HN before you did anything?

The postmortem...they admit that they need to hire more support staff.

That's my point. Their support got so bad that they had to be called out on in publicly before they did anything. That's hardly what you want to hear from a company like DO.

> That's my point. Their support got so bad that they had to be called out on in publicly before they did anything. That's hardly what you want to hear from a company like DO.

That's what you get with most providers these days. Ever tried reaching Google or Amazon?

I don't believe that Google or Amazon have ever done anything like what DO did before. However, if you notice their support guy Zach was responding to a completely different incident that is not related to the one being addressed with their post-mortem.

Actually I have complained to Amazon... and they have always responded within a couple days and in one case where I complained about Prime Video, they called me on a Sunday, which shocked me because everything is otherwise closed in Austria, except gas stations, restaurants and hospitals.

Google on the other hand, I make complaints or suggestions once every couple months and 99% of the time I don't even get a boilerplate response.

Amazon support is from everything I've heard and experienced great.

So don't lump everyone together in an attempt to paint DO in a better light when it's not true.

Amazon and AWS. I've always been happy with the support I've received from them. It's always been easy.

If you pay for enterprise support with Amazon you can open a case with a less than 15 minute SLA [1]. With business that goes down to an hour SLA. With both plans you can create chats or calls that typically get answered within a matter of minute with and assigned to an engineer with a background in the service.

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/plans/enterprise/

Customers should not have to resort to shaming you publicly to get timely support responses.

Two points establish a line.

Hey Sneak - I totally agree* :) We've already started efforts between Support and Security leadership to leverage the 24/7 structure of Support. Our goal is that no one will ever need to use social as an escalation path, and our new Support Engineers who are joining in mid-June and early July will be part of this a reality for our customers.

Fyi, I'm planning to migrate off of DO due to the crummy payment options. With every other recurring service I can have a PayPal subscription, DO doesn't support PayPal properly though.

Also, your billing system is incredibly spammy (1 to 2 emails a day at times). The bills I get are always for partial months despite the VMs on the account running for a full month.

Hey metildaa - Zach here from DO support. It is accurate that that do not currently support PayPal subscriptions, this certainly isn't the overall experience that you should be having. Can you shoot me an email (first name at) and I'll look into this for you?

Thank you! Zach

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