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Comment by biztos | Hacker News Reader

I've had a "droplet" going at $7/mo for about half a year and probably used it less than ten hours so far, and not doing anything too heavy when I use it. Every time I think about turning it off I say "yeah but it's only $7 and I like to ssh into it sometimes."

I've had a "shared hosting" setup on Dreamhost for at least 15 years, also using pennies per month in capacity, at most.

I get that it can be a brutal, low-margin business, but I also wonder how many "small" customers are extremely high-margin like me, and whether that can aggregate into a better overall margin than you might guess?

Or will you always have a few outliers running at capacity and calling the help desk and blowing out your margins?

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One of the interesting metrics from my time working in global escalations for one of the worlds largest electronics manufacturers is that most customers don't call in for support, but on average we get 3.5 calls per user per account lifetime.

The 80/20 rule in in full effect here. The 'needy' customers are extremely resource intensive.

I've sat in on some really gross calls in which my CTO at the time berated DO support for issues that didn't _really_ exist in an attempt to get better rates, or practically yelled at them when minor hiccups occurred in our infrastructure. It was very painful to sit in on. They were remarkably patient and cool about it. I suspect there are many people like him out there sucking up their time and resources.

Unless you're a business that differentiates itself with good customer support, you can just fire expensive customers.

You could, but there would be a significant risk of serious reputational harm.

This is probably what I would do. Keep around the high margin customers like the OP, but do something with the Complainy Pants Inc; either force-migrate them to a higher cost service tier, throttle them until they leave, or maybe just slow down their service.

The key to remaining competitive in cut-throat industries is knowing where to spend your limited time and money.

And now you've discovered the business model for Planet Fitness.

"either force-migrate them to a higher cost service tier, throttle them until they leave, or maybe just slow down their service. The key to remaining competitive in cut-throat industries is knowing where to spend your limited time and money."

How does this apply to Planet Fitness in any way?

Lunk Alarms are exactly this: a mechanism for ridding your company of high cost / high maintenance users to focus on the more profitable ones.

Shit, you've just reminded me that I have to finish some ansible playbooks I started in september. The VPS they were supposed to configure only had some hardening an no traffic since then.

you, personally, may be a high margin customer, but some, and perhaps a lot, of the $5/no customers are potential liabilities due to not patching software or libraries or choosing terrible passwords for their services, databases, etc.

one decent incident can cost a multiple of a year's revenue for the account.

is this just about cpu power from exploits?

no, more like someone's instance gets pwn-ed and is now part of a botnet and DO is getting calls and or isp-blocked and has to devote staff time to the incident.

I’ll never forgive DigitalOcean for deleting my portfolio site after 5 weeks of nonpayment.

5 weeks. Deleted everything.

Yes, I screwed up. But I would have happily paid them. They deleted the backups too.

When we inquired as to whether the backups could be restored now that we’ve paid them, they said it was impossible.

Blame me if you want and say it’s my fault. It certainly is; I admit that. But why was I paying them for backups that they wiped along with my server?

Meh.

(The card expired.)

"But why was I paying them for backups that they wiped along with my server?"

The issue seems to have been that you weren't.

Paid them for four years. If I had known they were going to delete the backups in just over one month, I wouldn’t have risked that.

Lost everything when they deleted the backups. They turned off the server on the same day, and it was running fine right up until then. Zero warning other than the emails I didn’t see.

So you didn't pay attention to the emails, didn't pay them, then get mad when they don't store data for free for you? Ok...

How should they get ahold of you? A call that you don't answer? A letter that goes unopened? African swallow laden with a note that you don't see?

Keep backups elsewhere. Regardless of cloud provider or payment terms or whatever. 3-2-1 backups.

Store backups for a little while and charge a fee (high enough to make this service profitable) to release them.

A customer for 4 years and they delete everything after 5 weeks? Can you really defend that? It's pretty clearly a bad policy. You're being facetious about other contact methods, but I think that's a great idea. Allow users to add a phone number. Some people have faulty spam email blockers.

I had a similar situation, but, a completely different outcome.

I had my wallet stolen on one of my work trips, and had all of my credit cards deactivated and new numbers issued. Digital Ocean's emails went to my "bulk" folder, and I missed the notifications saying that they were going to disable, then deactivate my service.

What caught my attention was one of the support guys emailing me and saying basically, "Hey, I see that you've been a customer for a long time -- we're going to give you 30 more days to fix this (and btw, you still owe us for your services so far) before we delete everything."

That support interaction -- that wasn't flagged as spam -- is literally what kept my data, and it keeps me using Digital Ocean: amazing support.

How long to hold it for though? If say 90% of customers that haven’t paid for 5 weeks end up never paying that is resources they will never recover the cost for.

What they could do is work out some high restore cost which makes the numbers work on holding all that data for longer.

You keep it until x days/weeks after the servers are deactivated. Where the emails are going unnoticed, the servers getting cut off usually is noticed straight away. The story here appears to be that the backups were deleted at the same time as the servers. For the relatively small cost of those who don't subsequently pay up, you get a lot of goodwill from the majority who just messed up.

When an account on DO is late with a payment, you go through three stages: hold, suspension, termination.

The hold happens right away and prevents you from creating new billable resources.

Then a suspension happens several weeks later, which powers off your servers.

You don’t get terminated until a couple weeks after that, at which point the data is irretrievable.

The time between each stage can vary depending on how long you’ve been a customer or what your monthly payments in the past have been, but that’s the gist of it.

It'd be nice if one could pay a bit more in advance, so one's data stayed some weeks or months longer than default, after the servers got powered off. — As an extra safety net, if the credit card expires when one is in bed for a month with a broken leg or some bad luck thing like that.

Did they attempt to contact you in those 5 weeks?

A lot of people seem willing to blame you without knowing the answer to this question.

On a different note, this kind of thing is probably one of the top threats to the survivability of a cloud-powered site or service. Alongside vandalism by disgruntled (ex-)employees, I imagine it happens far more often than outages in cloud providers' infrastructure.

They did. My issue was the timing. They turned off the server and deleted everything, including the backups, in a single day.

In contrast, I haven’t paid Dropbox for years and my data is all still there.

I'd rather have lower cost DO than pay to subsidize people who forget to pay for over a month. If you want that, use Dropbox.

The gall. I will never understand this mentality.

The point of backups is that they still exist after something went wrong. Something went wrong, the backups didn't exist, DO didn't do the job it was paid for.

DigitalOcean isn't obligated to store your data free of charge, which is what you're suggesting.

I'm not talking about non-customers of DO which is what you're suggesting.

I don't see that it matters. Storing data isn't free. Why should they be expected to do so in the absence of payment?

You do understand what a backup is?

Hello @MaxBarraclough and @anoncake,

Is there a simple solution for this?

DO reserves say $20 (just an example) when one spins up a new droplet, and if one forgets to pay — then, DO shuts down the server. But keeps the backups, until the GB-month cost is $20.

One could choose how much money to reserve, depending on how important the data one stored on the droplet, was. If it's just for running test: $0. Customer data: Maybe $$$ instead.

There could be a default that made the data and backup last for 2 or 3 months?

And any remaining money would be refunded, if one closes one's account or sth like that.

* * *

Actually I'll look into implementing this, in my own SaaS (which, like DO, takes monthly recurring payments and stores customer data).

I believe a solution like this is an elegant way to ensure that the customer gets what they 'believe' they are buying which is a sure-fire way to keep the customer happy.

The other folks here are giving you a hard time, so I'll just say I actually see things differently here. Things get overlooked, card expiration dates being one of them. Deleting a backup after such a short time is really poor form. Especially because these backups only exist because people need contingencies for machine and human error. Sending a threatening email 'fix your CC in 60 days or everything goes bye-bye' is preferable for almost everyone in this situation, and the difference in cost to DO would be negligible.

DO sends an email when they can't charge. They send a second email 21 days later, when the account gets suspended (which doesn't deleted anything), with essentially your message, except it's 14 days instead of 60.

It's five weeks really poor form but eight acceptable? Seems a bit subjective.

What about this:

DO reserves say $20 (just an example) when one spins up a new droplet, and if one forgets to pay — then, DO shuts down the server. But keeps the backups, until the GB-month cost is $20.

One could choose how much money to reserve, depending on how important the data one stored on the droplet, was. If it's just for running test: $0. Customer data: Maybe $$$ instead.

There could be a default that made the backups stay for 3 months?

Any remaining money could be refunded, whenever one wants.

(also "cross-posted/replied" here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22094218 )

6-week vacations aren't that uncommon, which is a scenario I would expect to encounter if I was DO. If that email doesn't get seen for 6 weeks it definitely shouldn't result in all backups being deleted. Beyond that, it's not unreasonable to imagine health issues or other external circumstances putting someone out of commission for 6 weeks (or even more, making it quite subjective).

All in all, from the moment of non-payment to the moment that everything you have on their servers is gone shouldn't be less than 90 days in my personal opinion. If that raised the cost of my backups by a few dollars, so be it. The backups are there to account for things I may not have been able to consider.

> 6-week vacations aren't that uncommon

I would love to live on the planet you live on

I may have said vacations, but people take time off work for any number of reasons. Paternity/Maternity leave, health, family needs, and so on. I had a 2-month lapse when I moved from Germany to the United States for example.

If there were, for any reason, an internal lapse in communication or processes (imagine small companies...) that could result in a pretty sour situation.

A different continent, not planet :- )

5 or 6 weeks vacation per year, + about 1 or 2 more weeks in total, because of Christmas, NYE etc, is how things work in Scandinavia.

(I feel curious about how things are, where you live )

This discussion could be easily settled by comparing the grace period to the ones provided by Vultr and Linode. Then compare all of them to Amazon, which I would bet blows everyone else out.

This is a huge fear of mine. I tend to do month-long "research" stints where I cut myself off from the world. But I'm yet to set up any backups outside of DO. Also a fear with losing domain names because with namecheap you can't set up any "backup" payment method.

> But why was I paying them for backups that they wiped along with my server?

Sounds like you weren't paying for backups.

tl;dr - customer stops paying service provider, and service provider stops providing services. Customer is upset.

This one's on you.

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