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Comment by talkingquickly | Hacker News Reader

I also use them and in general like them but would add to this list;

* Can't add backups to an already provisioned node

* Undocumented "droplet limits" e.g. one day you'll click "Add Droplet" and it will say "You've reached your droplet limit, please contact support". They'll generally raise it after some basic security verification but it's a nasty shock since you don't find out about it until you need to provision a new Droplet, especially if you're in a hurry.

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I too have been bit by the droplet limit. $60 credit (but no credit card) in my account, wanted to spin up a fast box to build a kernel, but I was locked out of the larger droplets. Never did get a straight answer as to why, just a suggestion to link a credit card. Oh well.

There are two droplet limits, one is the number of droplets that you can spin up which you can see in your settings page:

https://cloud.digitalocean.com/settings

The second is if a customer signs up using Paypal we restrict some of the larger sizes, this is done to minimize the amount of fraud we have to deal with.

Unfortunately we deal with a high amount of abusive and fraudulent signups so we've had to instate a lot of automated filters and other updates to the user experience. It really sucks, but without it we'd have a lot more fraud which would really just make the entire experience worse overall.

In either case opening up a ticket will get either issue resolved.

Sorry for the inconvenience but if anyone is good at fraud detection and wants to help us to continue to automate it and make it smarter, we are hiring =]

Thanks, Moisey

In my case it was the paypal/larger size restriction. And to be fair to DO, once I had opened a ticket (and provided links to the company website, twitter, facebook, and reason for wanting larger droplets) they explained that adding a credit card to the account would allow me to spin up the larger droplets. I didn't want to bother my boss, so I just dropped it.

Didn't know it was displayed in settings, really useful, thanks. My suggestion would be that there should be some sort of notice on the Droplet list page if you're at your limit.

I suggest this because I've been using Digital Ocean for quite a while (several different accounts for different projects/ clients) and have never needed to look at that page.

The need for limits and additional verification makes complete sense, but it would be useful for it to be highlighted in advance (e.g. in an intro email or banner) so you can deal with it in advance of it becoming a problem.

Warning a user when their account is approaching the limit is better than telling them they've already hit it. Google does this with the free apps version - "this account is nearing the limit of 50 users" - and it's visible but not overly prominent on appropriate management screens.

I'm paying with my credit card and larger sizes are disabled for me (NY1 location).

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