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.)
The issue seems to have been that you weren't.
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.
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.
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.
What they could do is work out some high restore cost which makes the numbers work on holding all that data for longer.
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.
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.
In contrast, I haven’t paid Dropbox for years and my data is all still there.
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 $$$ instead.
There could be a default that made the data and backup last for 2 or 3 months?
And any remaining money would be refunded, if one closes one's account or sth like that.
* * *
Actually I'll look into implementing this, in my own SaaS (which, like DO, takes monthly recurring payments and stores customer data).
It's five weeks really poor form but eight acceptable? Seems a bit subjective.
All in all, from the moment of non-payment to the moment that everything you have on their servers is gone shouldn't be less than 90 days in my personal opinion. If that raised the cost of my backups by a few dollars, so be it. The backups are there to account for things I may not have been able to consider.
I would love to live on the planet you live on
If there were, for any reason, an internal lapse in communication or processes (imagine small companies...) that could result in a pretty sour situation.
5 or 6 weeks vacation per year, + about 1 or 2 more weeks in total, because of Christmas, NYE etc, is how things work in Scandinavia.
(I feel curious about how things are, where you live )
DO reserves say $20 (just an example) when one spins up a new droplet, and if one forgets to pay — then, DO shuts down the server. But keeps the backups, until the GB-month cost is $20.
One could choose how much money to reserve, depending on how important the data one stored on the droplet, was. If it's just for running test: $0. Customer data: Maybe $$$ 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 )
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.