garlandcrow

This same experience happened to me 6mos ago as well, actually I tend to read this online every month or so. No response from them for weeks, they without warning locked and deleted all instances, data, backups, everything. It wasn't until I posted on HN that I got a response. They said it was a mistake and apologized but...yea...whoops we deleted everything and killed your start up, want a free month of service? So no matter how slick the UI, I will go out of my way to never use this trigger happy company that is killing peoples startups on a regular basis.

Hey drcongo, I'll tell you anything you want to know about my case either public or private.

At least in Tokyo I know plenty of people who are running PG on DO in a docker instances and just doing backups on DO cause its cheaper than something like heroku managed PG so if I was one of them (I kept my data layer off of DO) I would be completely destroyed by this. So I tell everyone I know now at meetups about this experience and so happy to share specific details.

They told me I log on from multiple locations (OMG I have a laptop and work while I travel, busted) and that I had a gmail address on my account.

The most agregious thing is that if their trigger happy "security and trust" flagger flags you, there is no warning where they reach out to you, they just destroy your instances, don't tell you about that either until you logon and are asked to file a ticket if you want your account unlocked...then a month later will unlock it for you but everything nuked.

Thanks for the message, I will send you an email with the details if you want to look into it. I'll gladly add any resolution etc to the write-up I am doing. Thanks.

I don't know about other providers, but I don't how the handling of any false positive from flagging is to not give any warning beforehand, destroy all instances, and not even give a courtesy mail after destroying all instances and locking accounts. I had to hear from a user that our site was down...(we were also in the middle of an expensive bio related computation that was 3 days in when all was destroyed)

Hi had heard a few stories like this here too but I figured it was people doing spamming or gambling or something like that. We are a biotech startup and also around $1k per month with our usage, and it was completely shocking.

Agreed, I have contacted them before over the 2 years and always they responded quickly. They responded w/in 24hrs and said that someone from "security and trust" team would review and get back to me, and that response took 5 weeks. So I guess at the point they already destroyed your instances they assume they lost you as a customer and don't really care anymore to get back to you in a timely manner.

I did go into full nerd rage because I can't believe they would do this to a startup, I had the critical stuff running in <1hr on Linode, but took a day for everything to be rebuilt since I had to redo everything w/out access to backups or images.

You have to have a data layer stored somewhere, are you saying to not store it on digital ocean? All this is a moot point when they destroy your instances and lock your account...

Oh, I did have backups luckily off of DigitalOcean (I will have full details in my post), but I have a huge problem with them marketing how great they are to startups and having a backups product that they sell (and also nuked). Any company that does this is not worth dealing with IMO.