You're not the only one. I am losing almost $500 in credits. I definitely won't be promoting them anymore. Guess I'll need to start looking for another company for my websites.
They've been in business for longer than DO and are profitable.
My referral link: https://www.linode.com/?r=0d2070f132f02d20a51d54ad971cba7a50...
Comparison: https://www.linode.com/digitalocean-vs-linode/
Performance benchmark: https://www.vpsbenchmarks.com/compare/docean_vs_linode
I don't care about karma or anything but I really hope this post hits the front page because this is a case of a publicly traded company benefiting from years of the community heavily promoting them and then now they're negating all of that, and stealing back all of those years of credits. It's like them directly reaching into your bank account and taking out that money because the transaction has already occurred to refer the customer to them.
The main issue is DO only offers referral payouts in the form of credits. Most other companies would pay out referrals over ACH or PayPal, not credits.
I switched to Vultr. Only 1 domain to enable for all their pages and they have also been very reliable. I only use it for test VMs, but just leave one running because it's only $2.50 a month or something.
I have a Linode VM too for production (HashBackup update server) and am really happy with them. At the time, Linode didn't have ultra cheap VMs, though it does now.