Hacker News Reader

Comment by jabiko | Hacker News Reader

I actually managed to get my account suspended one day due to nonpayment. It was just a personal toy project and it was completely my fault: I was automatically filtering the mails into a folder that I didn't read until it was too late.

If you look at the sheer amount of emails they sent me before suspending the account, Digital Ocean did everything right: https://i.imgur.com/ah13bEA.png

They gave lots of warnings and also sent an email with the date the account was going to be closed a week in advance.

View on HN

I was using Digitalocean for something last year and for reasons didn’t have the money to pay for the bill when it was due, they always have one month of warnings. Ie if I paid one month late, everything was ok and nothing was ever shut down and they sent multiple emails during that time. I knew exactly where I stood, what I owed, when I had to pay by, when they would shut down services etc. That seemed reasonable to me.

Just like you setup multiple instances across different availability zones for redundancy, you also need multiple billing contacts in case one of them fails and causes an outage.

Not sure how to mitigate these risks for providers that only support one "project owner" with a single billing address :/

Use a “synthetic” project owner with an email address that forwards to the group.

That could backfire, since nobody really feels in charge.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bystander_effect

But that's the same if you have multiple billing contacts. What is required is that the responsibility in the group of people that receive those notifications is clear.

Having multiple people that receive billing notifications is strictly better than having a single person - what happens if that person is on vacation, sick, overloaded? No one even has a chance of catching this. If at least one other person receives those increasingly important emails, they at least have a chance to catch this before it breaks.

Have one person clearly in charge, but as the emails get more frequent with increasingly dramatic titles the other people can check in and ask if everything is under control

Is it just me, or does imgur never load on Firefox mobile?

It loads fine for me in FF mobile.

I noticed something similar five weeks ago. Imgur would get stuck on the loading animation if I was in private mode but work otherwise.

It seems to work—at this moment, anyway—even in private mode for me now though. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Reply on news.ycombinator.com