Ask HN: DigitalOcean destroyed all my data while I was sick. Any recourse? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: DigitalOcean destroyed all my data while I was sick. Any recourse?

69 pointsdevastated17 comments

Today after recovering from an illness thanks to the pandemic I feel like I lost everything. I fell sick during the pandemic and for 45 days was in a very bad state. I did not check my emails where there was an outstanding to pay to Digital Ocean.

The amount was $3.4 over my account limit. And totally for a month it is $25 I spend. I am a long term customer with them since 2013 paying and using the service as a small time developer and service provider. I do not have enough resources to do external backups. But I do keep backups turned on and some of my projects were as snapshots requiring almost very little resources for DO.

Am so devastated to find today that after I cleared my paltry balance due, I found all my droplets, backups, and snapshots wiped clean. When I wrote back to DO explaining I was sick, I am a customer since 2013 paying regularly, and this is so devastating to me, they simply said sorry nothing can be done.

When I prodded more, they said they understand the pandemic situation and credited me some money into the account. They neither will escalate beyond their low level customer support nor say can restore anything.

Is there a way anything can be recovered if at all from their servers? Am even ready to pay them to do so for me. Some of it is a lot of work I had put in. And the data is valuable to me.

Also, I understand they will want to mitigate any non-payment risk. But think this kind of draconian policies applied to all customers is ridiculous in this age of big data and ai. Surely, they can give different credit limits for different customers (like me, a very small user for over 7 years with no issues till now) and do just a little more before automated emails and deletion.

What use is giving me credits now? If they had even put in $10 into my account a month before I would have not been in this situation now.

I think your only hope is to try and get the attention of someone higher up. They MAY have archives of this data recoverable, and MAYBE they can restore it without costing them an arm and a leg as a special one off if this gets some traction.

However I do know providers like this tend to run as lean as possible, so I could also imagine they wouldn't explicitly try not to hold any data longer then strictly necessary as not only does that storage cost, it would open up having to spend time and resources providing it to law enforcement when demanded.

I don't think personal credit limits is likely to occur. Companies wants to have the lowest amount of receivables possible, especially if they are looking for valuations. I think snapshotting and archiving this data for 90 or 180 days is more reasonable for long term customers of good standing (hell it probably would be worth it for retention).

If you get the data back, you might want to look at having a way to download the snapshots at least once a week, even if you just hold 2 on your development machine. Its not ideal, but it would at least limit the loss. Finally if you are charging a customer (assumed from the "service provider" usage), I would suggest looking at seeing if you can increase you price to cover storage on another provider.

I feel so sorry for you. I really do. But I have to say it. You need to do 3rd party backups always. never ever rely on the provider only. Unless it was an amateur thing but seems like it was very valuable to you.

one backup is no backup. offsite backups FTW

Well at Linode you would have had an opportunity to pay your balance for at least 60 days.

It would surprise me that DO is worse in policy than Linode, what good would it do them to delete your stuff if you owe them money? Who's going to pay a past balance for deleted content?

Are you sure you weren't WAY longer overdue than 45 days?

Are you sure your droplets aren't just turned off?

Snapshots make no sense to delete so soon, they are in cold storage essentially.

Do they not have a customer support number to contact someone higher up?

Don't even get me started about Linode, Terminated my account for "exhibited patterns associated with fraudulent behavior". (Without even notifying me) When I had not even created a single linode, and had made the account a day prior. I had heard such good tales about them, and they just left me disappointed.

Their sign-up is an odd process. Both me and a friend got blocked on sign-up for who knows what reason. Must be because we signed up while traveling

I get hosting companies have always had problems with abusers. The problem is, they banned me even before I did anything, and provided no recourse on opening a support ticket. They just ended with "this ban will not be reconsidered". I was honestly quite pissed but moved on since I lost nothing, Azure has been wonderful for me till now.

Prgmr.com and Linode are both much less draconian in their payment terms.

I think, due to dumbness/forgetfulness/lack of autopay on my part, I've lapsed payments for 3-4 months and my prgmr VMs stayed running.

I've been there, but with a small time hosting provider and they kept my servers shutdown for 20 days. When I paid it took a while but everything was up and running quick enough. I'm still with them to this day. Hope it works out and that DO is cool enough to have some of your work left. I did have off site backups as well but they were not accesible to me at that time, having your host being able to solve these things is sucha stress relief.

I had a terrible user experience trying to register with Digital Ocean and their customer support and decided to never use them.

I had too, I registered and paid billing with paypal. Suddenly they locked my account without any reason. I contacted their CS, they just said money would back, nothing they could do, what the hell suck system. So I changed to another VPS.

Do you know how long it has been since they deleted your stuff?

/u/raiyu, /u/bcooks

Doesn't that only work on Reddit?

Just add reddit.com in front.

Translate accordingly to HN profile URI. User short URIs aren’t short here.

i wonder if it could make financial sense for companies to not screw over their customers in this way.

that is, can it be made profitable in some way?

because i don't expect it to happen because companies are trying to be decent world citizens or fair or whatever.

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