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Comment by DanBlake | Hacker News Reader

FWIW, all I ever read about on HN is how DO is constantly a disaster. Why you would choose to host there is beyond me. Just move your blog- It takes all of a few hours.

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I had an incident where there was a problem with one of my droplets and their response was to shut down all of my droplets, and only leave me a message saying they needed to verify my identity. I had to ask questions to even figure out why my droplets were shut down. After communicating with them for about a half a day they agreed to turn them all back on and in the future to only shut down the offending droplets (without giving them my identity, by the way). I'm still using DO but will definitely scale back in the future, they seem to be run like a hobbyist gaming clan forum.

More information about the 'incident' would allow readers to make an informed judgement about whether this was reasonable behavior or not.

Not sure what information you want. Do you think it's ever reasonable for a VPS provider to suspend an account without telling the customer why the account was suspended?

Doesn't the fact that they agreed to handle it differently in the future indicate that they even believe they handled it inappropriately?

This is not remotely rare in web hosting. If you're on a shared host and over consume resources you'll be shutdown before the admin has a chance to even generate a ticket. Some hosts don't even generate a ticket, they just suspend the account with a page that informs the owner that they've over consumed resources.

Not saying it's great, but when you're dealing with hundreds of thousands of VPS/cPanel accounts and one account affecting 5000 other accounts on a server you're sometimes forced into a corner where you have to act as quickly as possible.

yes except these are independent hosts not one host in a shared hosting service. s/host/droplet/

It's very cheap and very fast - ideal for testing your deployment scripts. I would never run a live service from there however. (you can't even do realistic HA on their service without involving some third-party for being the front-end)

FWIW, this is one of only a few 'bad' DO incidents I've seen, among many very positive things.

As a DO user for over a year, I can say I am mostly very happy with the service I have received, although I hope they issue a statement about this, apologising to the author and pledging to review their policies on this.

Same here. I've been very pleased with their service but DO is way out of line here. Shutting down content based on a single complaint, without a court order or any kind of injunction -- and then saying that the customer has to get a court order from a NY court to keep it open? Exactly the opposite of what I expect from a VPS.

Some of the bad I've read in the past couple months alone are bad enough that no amount of positives base on loose reviews of recent users is going to counter the few bads.

I'm quite happy with them. I run two production servers and a development server on them. Way more barebones than the AWS ecosystem, but significantly cheaper, which gives me a better margin in my maintenance agreements with clients.

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