DigitalOcean has the worst reviews I've ever seen | Hacker News Reader

DigitalOcean has the worst reviews I've ever seen

trustpilot.com

44 pointszaczekadam69 comments

I like this one:

> They lost thousands of dollars because they couldn’t reset my password without my dads Photo ID because I used his credit card in the past (we got the same name I’ll show you my ID I just legally can’t talk to my dad so I can’t get that ID or billing info)

Seems like most of them are.. kinda suspicious users.

Seems like there are two classes of complaints:

1) People receive spam from Digital Ocean. They run their own mail servers, but can't handle spam, and this is Digital Ocean's problem. (I stopped running my own mail server because of spam, but I don't blame DO for that.)

2) Fraudsters are prevented from signing up. I am sure VPS providers have a ton of people that don't pay for their service, so blocking them at signup time is probably mandatory. From some of the complaints, it sounds like people have their payment declined, DO contacts them, they still don't have money, and then DO cuts them off. That seems totally reasonable to me. I don't think a VPS provider could make money without some sort of strict account termination policy and anti-fraud analysis before signup. It's bad customer service, but if you can't pay your bill, you're a burden, not a customer. Them's the breaks.

Digital ocean is an excellent source of spam, hacks and, port scans. Not that the majority of customers are doing that, but they seem to do little to curb the nepharious. Blocking DO IP ranges does a lot to quieten intrusion logs (if you pay attention to them).

This is incredible:

> absolute joke of a company.

> requested a payment extension as i just got a new job, which means that my date of being paid has changed from the previous one - refused it and then have the audacity to say "we are hopeful that you can find another solution to solve your financial difficulty"

translation: I couldn't keep up my end of the bargain and got mad at them for not giving me free things

I don't think it's unreasonable. Let's say you're usually getting paid on the 21st, server bill on the 22nd - now you switch jobs and get paid on the 28th. Is it unreasonable to ask for a week long payment extension, one-off, to bridge the gap? I grew up living welfare payment to welfare payment and we've had services cut off for this kind of thing. A little kindness goes a long way.

You’re right: it would be a kindness for them to offer this. Not offering doesn’t make them an “absolute joke of a company”.

You're right, it doesn't. They way they phrased their response, however, definitely starts heading in the "absolute joke" direction, at least to me.

What’re they meant to say? “Get rekt”?.

Whichever support rep responded to this ticket clearly couldn’t do what the person wanted, but felt bad, so they ended their response with the hope that the person was able to find another solution.

I had an outstanding balance for about 2 weeks with them when I was using them and they didn't suspend my account, and I didn't even contact them. I don't know what the original person was asking for.

>I don't know what the original person was asking for.

Wouldn't it be better to withhold judgement, then?

>This is incredible...

>translation: I couldn't keep up my end of the bargain and got mad at them for not giving me free things

What's incredible is that you're judging someone for having a financial situation that appears to be much tighter than your own. That's not a wholly unreasonable request for someone to make.

They asked for an extension and were willing to pay as soon as they got paid. That's the opposite of asking for "free things".

Having a tight financial situation is one thing, but it's the entitlement that did it for me. If you ask and they say no, that's that. It's why terms of service exist.

Not to mention that I've missed bills with DO when my own financial situation was tight and they didn't kill everything the instant I missed a payment. I used them all through college as a web server and a dev server, and it looks like they gave me about 2 weeks of an outstanding balance before I paid them.

>Having a tight financial situation is one thing, but it's the entitlement that did it for me. If you ask and they say no, that's that. It's why terms of service exist.

That's totally fair, and I would've acted as such myself were I in that spot, frustration be damned. That said, it's still disingenuous to suggest that they pitched a fit because they didn't get "free things" when they were clearly willing to pay, just later than usual.

No, come on. :D What's the limiting principle on these exceptions? The terms of the agreement are the most logical. The obligation of the consumer if they have risky finances is to save a contingency fund (one month of extra payment) for such scenarios. It's not DO's responsibility to accommodate crap financial planning for every person on the planet. The prospect of losing hosting (for whatever reason) is why every DO customer should be backing up their content/config/etc on a regular basis.

Please re-read my comments in this thread. I haven't said DO was obligated to have acquiesced here, in fact I've said that I would've taken their "no" and accepted it if I were in this person's situation, frustration be damned.

I simply think it's a poor move to judge one's financial situation and accuse them of asking for "free stuff" when, in point of fact, they were still trying to pay, albeit late.

DO bills in arrears, so it’s stuff they already delivered and have not been compensated for. To my knowledge DO will keep your system alive for like 60 days for resurrection after you stop paying (ask me how I know). Some companies, like Meraki, are pretty flexible when you need an extension of time, but to my knowledge it’s limited to twice per customer lifetime. But there you have customers with significant investment in equipment with much to lose if they don’t eventually pay. DO’s customers are far less sticky and there’s really nothing securing their commitment.

Again, you and I agree there. Without repeating myself, I really don't know how else to tell you that you've missed my point, and that's fine.

I imagine at least some of the bad reviews are there because DO serve the absolute bottom end of the market and with that comes a specific kind of difficult customer.

What's the high end of the VPS market?

Local datacenters

AWS

I realise AWS is a giant outfit, but comparing and contrasting their EC2 admin panels with the DO one, you'd be hard pressed to say AWS feels like a premier solution.

AWS is much more than EC2, though.

They offer a lot more than just VPS services. But compared to the likes of AWS, Azure and GCP their pricing structure is simple and predictable. That coupled with the straightforward management interface, team management & access control systems make it a very inexpensive and approachable solution. It just has a really low barrier of entry, and its partially why I chose them for some projects with my current employer. There isn't enough rope in the management UI to hang yourself with, and I can handover the lot to my replacement even if they're not particularly clued up on system administration.

So to answer your question, I see DO as offering a subset of what AWS/Azure/GCP do, with the cost and complexity savings to reflect that. So those larger cloud providers are what I consider the higher end.

and poorer performance. Their S3 compatible solution is good for archiving only

Correct. This feels like the type of people that go out of their way to give negative reviews to Taco Bell.

The bottom of the market is the no-name companies that offer VPS for $1/month or so, or even less in some cases. Can't comment on the quality of these offerings but I have to assume most if not nearly all of them are pretty bad (and forget about support).

Seems like there isn't really any substance to most of the negative reviews. I've never used Trustpilot before but after seeing this it doesn't look like something I would rely on.

Trustpilot is pay to play, so I wouldn't give them too much credibility.

They are also a proxy for Google revenues as they are one of only a handful of providers for reviews that show up on Google results. So you have to pay Trustpilot to get reviews to show up on your organic search engine results and Truspilot then goes and pays that to Google to be one of the review providers... and then Trustpilot also gives paying customers a lot of leeway to remove bad reviews.

My guess is that DO refused to pay Trustpilot and so a lot of the spam reviews don't get removed... and that's how this racket works.

Not sure why this site is being posted as some legitimate source of reviews.

Trustpilot is known for basically review extortion by doing SEO for "[company name] reviews" search terms and shadow profile pages. Angry customers, spammers, possibly even competitors go on the pages and can write anything. Then they do sales calls to these businesses to give them the tools to "remove spam" or pay off customers to clean up the review page. Nothing about their business model is actually conducive to an honest collection of reviews.

They also have a business relationship with Google so Google is a beneficiary of this racket...

As someone else pointed out in the comments here, just look at the "reviews" for Apple.com.

They're kinda like Yelp, except the only people who go to them are people searching "business name + reviews", or business owners being extorted.

Disclosure: Former DigitalOcean employee.

But Trustpilot is basically just a Web 2.0 Better Business Bureau, where companies are basically incentivized to send them traffic in order to get their score increased. If you hover over the overall rating, it notes that the reviews aren't the sole decider, it's also "whether the company sends people to review it". A certain read of that might imply that it means they punish people for sending artificial reviews, but Trustpilot actually does the opposite and strongly encourages businesses to entice people to provide reviews. Their entire business-oriented product is ways to send people solicitations to write reviews on their website.

I’ve used DO for around 8 years and have had mostly great service & experience with them. At the time of switching, we cut our hosting fees from around $1k to under $300. Now we are running on their hosted kubernetes service and it’s working great. They simplify a lot of things and the pricing is pretty straight forward.

I use DO for my personal projects - they've got a perfectly fine API, costs are low, everything works like it says on the tin, most tools work well with DO (terraform, ansible) and they have an interesting documentation culture with lots of tutorials.

I was quite impressed with the migration approach, lead-time on notification of migration and self-service on-your-own-time migration options when being shifted to new servers (which required a cold-migration).

It sounds like the perl and pain of being a low-cost service provider.

I’m not sure I’ve had a bad interaction with Digital Ocean, and their service offering keeps getting better.

Review sites are certainly where people go to complain, but i’m also very suspicious now a days of people gaming reviews.

> perl and pain

I feel this typo.

This is funny because I absolutely think DO is one of the top 2 "small" cloud infra providers and none of those reviews have changed my mind, maybe I'm struck with a bit of "it wouldn't happen to me" syndrome.

Does anyone have anything good to say about TrustPilot? How does it's business model (and the incentives it produces) differ from Yelp?

Top 2? What's the other one?

I'm guessing Linode.

ding ding ding

DO and Linode are basically my top 2 in my mind for breadth of offering (going past being simply VPS providers), standing the test of time, and being generally trusted where I see them.

If you go to "just" VPS/server providers I have a whole 'nother list, and at the top is Hetzner :)

TrustPilot appears to have looked at all the negative parts of Yelp and just explicitly embraced that as their business model rather than pretending to be neutral.

I default to assuming that anything which mentions TrustPilot in its marketing is a scam of some sort.

This is enough to turn me off, even if these reviews are mostly from fraudsters who the AI cutoff. Hosting on a platform that attracts this type of user increases my risk. Either due to being cutoff myself or stuff like bad IP ranges, excessive ID verification.

I feel sorry for DO, they've built a great product but servicing the bottom end of the market seems harder and less rewarding than experienced by major or niche cloud providers.

Sadly, every hosting platform attracts fraud. It's a very difficult problem to prevent and the payoff when people break through fraud prevention is quite high.

Some providers feature in scammer tutorials much more than others; for being cheap, offering free credit, easy to use, powerful and susceptible to multiple accounts per credit card or supporting unusual payment providers that scammers like.

DO ticks many of those boxes or did in the past.

Sounds like a shit site to trust in the first place: ""Apple is rated "Poor" with 2.2 / 5 on Trustpilot"

Basically the default with reviews is spam and difficult customers... Trustpilot's business models and incentives are basically to get people to pay them to remove these spam reviews.

Apple is basically a good benchmark. Basically if you can get 2.2 / 5 on Trustpilot you're at Apple tier service, and anything above that means you've either paid off the negative reviews or paid off Trustpilot.

Source: I'm on the receiving end of a lot of Trustpilot sales calls.

I signed up to Digital Ocean this year for personal use and while I haven't deployed anything to 'production', I have found everything about it to be quite good.

Having said that I am not a paying customer right now.

Anyone with experience operating on DO want to comment on this? They have great marketing and seem like they offer a nice developer experience, but reviews like this are pretty bad…

I used them for small, basic stuff 10 years ago and liked it fine. Not an exciting data point, but one for the pile.

I've been operating a fairly active messageboard off them for nearly 3 years now, so far I've not had a single outage, and their AI abuse system hasn't decided to bestow its wrath on me yet.

I've also hosted about a dozen client sites of varying sizes with them over the last few years, no issues from any of those either.

I run a small site with them and I have nothing to complain. It's cheap and easy.

I have some experience with the Oracle cloud and I find it unnecessarily complicated (as all things Oracle tend to be).

I've been hosting things on them for the last ~5 years. They're fine. It's all been small webserver stuff, so nothing huge (3 droplets), but I've had no complaints.

Most of these read like the kinds of nastygrams I've received at two separate companies when we shut off fraudulent accounts. The nice thing about DO is that they are easy to try at very small scale, it's probably safe to dismiss these particular reviews.

Never had a problem with DO.

I have about 10 servers running on DO, one of them for email. I do everything to look trustworthy but my email still ends up in spam so I'm assuming a bad IP block range.

Anyhoo, I also do a bunch of DNS stuff with DO. Haven't had issues in the past...is it 5 years I've been with them?

I have a friend who works at Vultr so I'm testing them out for a side project.

I’ve used them professionally and personally for the past 3-5 years and I don’t have a bad experience to speak of.

I haven’t run any large infrastructure, though. Mainly micro services and web sites—so mainly a couple of VPS instances, databases, and volumes.

All good.

There’s little that looks trustworthy about these reviews. There are some threads here where people talk about running production on DO: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

A lot of the reviews are…suspicious to say the least. Have used DO for ~3 years without any major complaints. There was once a small window of time in which a site I host was down for ~20 mins, but apart from that was robust and good value. No reasons to jump ship here.

For some reason most reviews on trustpilot are negative for pretty much all companies I interact with. I think it's just where people go to complain...

There's always a negativity bias in reviews. People are more likely to go out and leave a bad review than they're likely to leave a good review for service as expected. That's true for any product or service, and it's something you should always take into account when comparing stuff online. You're incredibly unlikely to find a product with only real, positive reviews.

Based on their apparent automatic abuse filter for new customers (probably filtering out known scammers or something) I'm willing to believe that some people are blocked from the platform because of false positives. I'm sure some of those complaints are real and valid, but I'm also sure you can probably work your way through the block by providing them with some more PII to verify your identity if you really want to become their customer.

They should embrace this reality and rename it to grumbleclub.

Exactly this. No one is going to seek out a third party review site to post about how good or average a product or service is.

Lots of these reviews are spurious, but I did have a very negative experience trying to use Digital Ocean despite not being a fraudster. They locked me out of my account with no warning, before I even had a chance to spin up a droplet or do much of anything. This happened twice with two different accounts using two different emails, so I gave up. To this day I'm not sure why it happened.

I’ve had good experience with do for small projects. I have not used it for anything major. There are of course horror stories kicking around for every cloud provider, the medicine for each is just some variant of “have backups outside of that cloud” (except for cost overruns, but dos pricing seems more predictable than some other providers)

Yeah, I used them at my last job and for personal stuff, and they've always been great to me. Support tickets are resolved quickly and intelligently. The pricing is pretty okay as well. I have no complaints.

I have a 2 small websites running on digital ocean VPS's and use their S3 service (DO Spaces) and really enjoy digital ocean! It's very straight forward and I know I'm not going to get slapped with an insane bill like I might on AWS. Overall, great experience for personal projects!

I moved away from digital ocean 2 years ago, it is one of the worst "cheap" cloud provider, well not cheap anymore, they use their pseudo notoriety to inflate the price of their new products, i'm looking at you managed databases

I'm another one with nothing but good experiences with DO. again, nothing major, but hosting a handful of sites for a handful clients of mine has been nothing but smooth and profitable

I've been with Vultr for two years.

Never had any problems.

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