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Comment by etchalon | Hacker News Reader

Time to start looking into DigitalOcean more seriously.

G Cloud is already unreasonably expensive and nearly impossible to price manage. It's cool to see them double-down on that.

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For last 7 years I am running DO and never had any issue. I never understand why it is looked down. In fact I have faced so many issues with AWS (particulary their old hardward). In one case, our ec2 instance was rebooting frequently. AWS team didn't accept any issue from there end and after few weeks ask us to upgrade instace because of bad health.

In my experience, AWS is a very expensive cloud with clunky UI and big brand name. During consulting gigs, I have seen many customers want to go with AWS only because of brand. And later they cry when bills start to hit roof with vendor lock in.

I recently tried to spin up a VM for my own use in AWS, but I had to do a rate increase because I wanted a beefier machine. Easy peasy. My experience was comically bad.

====================== First email from AWS (several days after my request): ======================

Thank you for submitting your Limi Increase request.

I'm contacting your to inform you that we've received your Workspaces Application Manager - Total Products limit increase request, for a max of 5 in the Oregon region. I will be more than happy to submit this request on your behalf.

Please note that for a limit increase of this type, I will need to collaborate with our Service team to get approval. This process can take some time as the Service team must review your request first in order to proceed with the approval. This is to ensure that we can meet your needs while keeping existing infrastructure safe.

You may rest assured I will push towards expediting your request to be addressed as soon as possible. As soon as the Service team contacts me I will definitely let you know by email.

In the meantime, please feel free to let me know if you have any additional questions or concerns and I'll be happy to help!

I appreciate your patience while we evaluate your request.

====================== Second email: ======================

Thank you for your kind patience whiIe we continue to evaluate your Workspaces Application Manager - Total Products limit increase request.

I apologize for the time is taking to provide you with a resolution as we've always aimed to provide our customers with a rewarding experience that meets and goes beyond expectations. Unfortunately, from time to time there are cases where the final outcome is handled by another department and the time they take is completely out of our hands.

We certainly understand the sense of urgency that you have for this particular request and therefore, we have spent time communicating with the service team to let them know about it. Rest assured that your case is active, being looked into and the sense of priority has been transferred. As soon as we have an update from their end we'll be touching base with you immediately.

I am committed ensuring that you will get the help that you need as fast as possible, so we can ensure everything is being handled to your satisfaction, please feel free to let us know if you have any further questions or concerns through this case, so we can address them as soon as possible.

============= My response: =============

You can go ahead and cancel my request -- I've decided to not go forward with my project.

============= Their reply: =============

Greetings from Amazon Web Services.

We're sorry. You've written to an address that cannot accept incoming e-mail.

If you need to contact us, please visit http://www.aws.amazon.com/contact-us .

Thank you for your business.

I always suspect, do they still copy configuration manually ? Is this delay because of that ? There was article where in early days AWS was doing it. Even amazon.com was not running on AWS those days. Hope it is not the case.

It seems... strange to call Workspaces Application Manager “a VM you tried to spin up”

Workspaces are already a specialized product built on the AWS ecosystem; WAM is a niche management tool inside that niche.

DO is pretty famous for losing data.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20064169 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17225665

Goddammit.

https://blog.digitalocean.com/an-update-on-last-weeks-custom...

DO is famous for being a pain in the ass. They’re great for tiny hobby things but honestly I’d never run a prod/serious/client workload there. Too many issues. I’ve had multiple clients lose a droplet due to a simple credit card expiration.

It’s a race to the bottom on price so this doesn’t surprise me. They chose this life.

To be fair, what is the best way to handle expiring credit cards? For one of my SaaS products, I give a 30 day grace period, then delete the data. If they didn't have a backup, that's on them...

If they delete the droplet the second a single CC payment fails, that's one thing, but I don't believe that's how their system works.

If you are literally in the business of enabling, storing, and protecting production workloads, data, etc.. then catastrophic data loss should be an asbolute last resort.

In both of these instances I am referring to a balance of less than $20.

So for less than $20 (a few weeks late) DO says, welp fuck this customer we are going to terminate all of their resources immediately.

This is what DO and others need to do: Put it in your terms that you will keep racking up charges and then send it to collections. Charge interest, charge fees, do whatever you want. Turn $20 into $40. Why? Because businesses do not give a shit... if it is between losing everything or a slap on the wrist (monetary fee) they will chose the latter every time.

One of my clients had to painstakingly trudge through archive.net to recreate their missing blog posts. How fucking miserable is that? Over a few hundred megabytes of disk that DO could have kept around...

Also, actally make an effort to reach out before doing anything serious. Call phone numbers, email other members on the team to alert them to the issue, etc...

Too many times I have seen some script kiddie throw together a client's WP site and toss it on DO because it is 'so cheap and cool' and yet they forget about everything else: backups, security, managing the box, etc... and inevitably shit will hit the fan.

I was really rootin' for DO in the beginning. I even applied to work there when they were first starting out but did not want to relo to NY. Now I am moving three clients OFF of DO because they are all very unhappy with the level (or lack) of service they've received.

I keep backups of my cloud data whenever possible. Mostly a couple hundred mb for small projects, I have been bitten by the same situation in the past

Or...if it was important enough to you that losing it hurts, then maybe pay attention to your emails and don't let things expire and pay your shit on time. And of course, a sane person would backup anything important.

Yep, and that is something I have since instituted since taking the reigns. Still... DO could turn this lemon of a situation into lemonade by increasing revenue and preventing unnecessary headache for their customers.

Ok, lets say I store all my backups at AWS, Google and Azure. My credit card expires and all backups are gone. What's the point of additional backups in this scenario?

Aws, gcp and azure are unlikely to delete your shit the moment your card expires?

I think the saying "you get what you pay for" would apply in this case. People want to not pay for things, they don't get the things.

I think OP is saying that DO will delete all of those things if your credit card expires. Even if you have those features in place, you will lose everything.

Yep and I'm saying the reason DO isn't able to call you up to see why your card expired and to get you updated is because you're not paying enough to expect that level of service from them. There simply isn't enough "profit" from a service that costs so little to allow for that many customer service reps.

Why would you use the cloud but have that single point of failure? Billing is also a network activity. Why not have the backup infrastructure linked to another credit card?

If you know how these storage services worked under the hood you would understand that durability is not guaranteed. It is the responsibility of the customer to ensure their data is backed up.

Except no data wasn actually lost in that case? They got full access back to their account, and additionally, it wasn't a technical issue - they were accidentally flagged as a fraudulent / abusive account.

I linked two incidents. The first one required a trending HN post to get resolved. The second, the developer never got their data back.

DO minimum for a cluster is $20/mo. That sure beats $72 although gcloud is offering the first zonal cluster for free. It might still be cheaper to use gloud for small things. I do really like DO though, have a few personal projects hosted there.

Look at Vultr too. My last 2 support tickets were responded to within 2 minutes and solved within 10 minutes. Their support has always been good, but unlike almost all other companies, it seems to get better as they grow.

I run a Kubernetes cluster on Vultr and I haven't had any problems.

Outside of just hating Microsoft...why not Azure?

Azure is as expensive as G Cloud, and less robust.

DO is for garage projects. If you need anything serious it's AWS / GCP or MS.

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