Have been a mostly happy DO customer for some time. Would be interested to know if the layoffs were carried off skillfully/compassionately or messily/carelessly.
I was also a happy DO customer for the last 5 years or so. But now I'm locked out of my account.
My fault for losing my codes (DO are the only backup codes I can't seem to find where I kept them... oddly they are not in my password manager) but they have a process in place for this and don't follow it. I'd be less annoyed if I was told it was my fault and there wasn't an avenue to receive support than being told I can go to support and then get ignored...
In the case of digital infrastructure, I'm actually kinda ok with this. Would be better if it was a policy or if you could prove ownership of the payment account, but at the very least it's much harder to social engineer someone out of an account.
Of course, the lack of support isn't good.
I use cock.li [0] for my emails. This is the official password recovery process:
> I forgot my password!
> Passwords are not reset for any reason. Good luck.
Many years ago - I forgot my password to my email! It was the kick in the ass I needed to begin using a password manager - and since the email was mostly for memes and not really used it was mostly a positive experience with a positive outcome. I occasionally try to login to the email but so far no luck in remembering my password. :)
This is my greatest fear with my 2FA stuff and why I try to make sure and always have an available backup.
I provided the payment details, the date and amount of the last transaction as text, a screenshot of my bank statement of the transaction, 2 forms of ID (passport & driver's license), and a photo of my face next to both ID's on January 23rd. I replied again on February 7th with the most recent date of my transaction and the amount paid.
No response.
The tough lesson to learn is always to deploy from a source code repository.
It sucks to lose your stuff, but if you follow best practices it will make you a better developer/architect and things like this will only become minor inconveniences.
I had to lose months of hard work for similar reasons to learn this lesson.
Redeploying the site and even saving all the files uploaded to the site are both relatively trivial. The deploy is almost entirely automated and I can still login to my root user panel, download any uploaded files, and transfer them over to the newly deployed site - so I'm only experiencing minor data loss. (eg. the DateUploaded for files will be lost and I don't care enough to try and back that up to restore it)
Hopefully I do everything right and prevent link rot. Thankfully I'm the sole user of my file host so nobody else is losing any data.
[0] If anyone wants to become the 4th and probably final person to ever solve my CTF - you have just shy of 2 weeks before it breaks: https://nadyanay.me/ctf
Maybe stuff got better, but 2FA Recovery seems to not be as bad as you're saying.
This is my "Sent" folder: https://imgur.com/a/3D1FSYz
Initial ticket was sent to Support on Jan 23rd, I bumped and asked if there was any issue with the information I provided on Jan 29th or if they needed more information, I then provided February's payment on Feb 7th. I wanted the answer to "The date and amount (in USD) of the last billing transaction by DigitalOcean." to be up-to-date since January's was no longer a valid answer for the information that was being requested.
I reached out to @DigitalOcean on Twitter about my tickets and the older one was closed out as a dupe and we moved forward with the most recent one. They weren't able to verify my ID - no reason give but I think I know why - and they asked if we can move forward with an alternate means of verification: a random temp charge between $0.01 and $4.99 to the account and I provide the amount of the charge.
I agreed to this - and 12 hours later I forgot if I had replied so I agreed to it again. This morning I received an automated response asking for me to respond. I responded. 2 hours later still no response - I hit up Twitter again. I'm thinking the reason they weren't able to verify my ID is because they never got my email providing it in the first place.
Now - despite not verifying any charge amount - literally as I was typing this post I received an email stating 2FA was disabled. Either they lied about not being able to verify my ID or they decided to unlock my account anyway without verification which may be of concern to others.
E:
2FA re-enabled and this time I made damn sure to backup my backup codes properly... also responded to the support ticket one final time requesting they verify if they've received it. If I don't hear back I'm going to assume I should change the email associated with my account. :)
Changing the email address associated with my account to one that hopefully isn't blocked in the future.
Question in case anyone actually sees this: What downsides would there be to whitelisting email addresses associated to active/paying customer accounts? Seems like a no-brainer move to have your customers whitelisted to send you email if support is primarily done through email. I understand blacklisting domains known for abuse/spam but whitelisting individual accounts from that domain that are paying you seems like a good compromise having only put 5 seconds of thought into it.
I guess a word to anyone who uses non-standard email (and by non-standard I sadly mean "not Gmail, Outlook, or Yahoo"...) to test if you can actually contact support with your email address. Best to confirm you can when you don't need it than not be able to when you do!