TLDR; account locked out suddenly without any follow-up to my inquiries from customer service over 48+ hours. Sadly, I used to love DO for their balanced pricing, range of services, docs, online written material. I <i>thought</i> they were among the best of the best.<p>Long story short, I've had an account with them for roughly 5+ years as I recall, <i>good</i> credit card on file, monthly bill around $20-50, US address. I use a few droplets to run dokku/docker containers for dev and 1 private Google Outline VPN endpoint, only for me. I only ssh into these from non-root and root should be turned off completely (but I'm only a hacker and not a F/T systems person).<p>Not sure if it matters but I don't do anything nefarious on these droplets-- no webscraping, no botnet creation, no crypto mining. I don't know what else would be considered verboten!?!<p>Try to log in with github, won't work and asks for email login. Try to login from there, and it asks for credit card info for "authorization" although the card is the one on file and being charged for so many years.<p>No recourse, and what a crappy way to treat clients even if they are small potatoes in the grand scheme of things. Thankfully I am building a new MVP all on AWS and have my company prod there too running for 5 years. So I don't have to put up with unprofessional dealings and major risks of service interruption.<p>Assume through no fault of your own that you could be shut out of everything. You have been warned.
Don't worry vfulco2, you've reached the front page of HN, the official support portal of Digital Ocean. Your account will be restored within two hours.
I've been having this problem a lot recently. First Rackspace, later CloudFlare. Most recently Twitter accused me of being a robot and asked me to verify that I'm a human by posting a government-issued ID even though I rarely use it and I've never posted a comment there and could not have possibly broken any policies. Sorry that this is happening to you. I think tech companies at large are really failing individuals. Even if it's only 1 - 2% of users annually, it adds up across the dozens of services we use day-in, day-out for years and it really isn't good.
*<i>Update*</i> to their credit, they've followed up with me. The github login was routing to the wrong account (a rarely used account) and was caught in their automatic fraud process. They've verified the main account (5 year old) is still intact and given me instructions to get back in.<p>I am immensely relieved. They've done right by me.
Something like this has happened before:<p>DigitalOcean Killed Our Company: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20064169" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20064169</a>
Digitalocean will automatically lock any account I create, because of an (admitted!) false positive in their fraud software. Literally any IP, any credit card, any email address I use- seconds after taking out a test deposit on the card, the account is locked.<p>Every time I've messaged support for an account lock, 24 hours later I'm informed it was a false positive and the account is unlocked. Needless to say, this does not inspire confidence that my resources are going to be kept up and running past Kafkaesque fraud monitoring systems
*<i>Update*</i> to their credit, they've followed up with me. The github login was routing to the wrong account (a rarely used account) and was caught in their automatic fraud process. They've verified the main account (5 year old) is still intact and given me instructions to get back in.<p>I am immensely relieved. They've done right by me. Kudos for a delayed but excellent response.
I used to like Digital Ocean. But it seems as though ever since they went IPO all the engineers became rich and absconded to Hawaii. Or they're at least not working. It's Noam Bardin's Law in effect.<p>I'm looking for the next Digital Ocean. Something still bespoke, with higher cost but better customer support. So far oldschool VPS hosts are looking good.
What does HN recommend these days for app hosting? I'm a solo dev without deep pockets. I was looking at Linode and DO, but posts like this have me worried about the later.
I had something similar but it was DMCA complaints for a forum I ran. I complied with the deletions but after a handful they just deleted my stuff. I moved to OVH. What a joke.
Don’t use Digital Ocean for anything, not just production. Your account may be locked up and customer service will keep sending boilerplate responses. There is no way I know of to contact a human and find out why the account is locked and what options exist. DO has been heavily understaffed for years, and the mass layoffs in early 2020 likely made things far worse.<p>I see value in supporting smaller companies (relative to large ones like Amazon, Microsoft or Google), but smaller companies usually tend to have better customer support when things go wrong, and are generally a lot more helpful. With DO, it has the kind of offerings by a smaller company with the kind of support by a large company.
I tried them after reading here about how their support is excellent and had an interesting one-day experience. Not long after logging in for the first time their site started having some issues, such as the GUI being jumbled because the asset weren't loading correctly. It went down officially a minute later and I didn't have time to hang around until it came back up. I got charged for the things that had enabled themselves or failed to really disable during that mess, so I asked for the money back. The first response gave me a guide to closing my account, so I tried again. The second response was to refund me some loose change (some dollars and cents).
Does anyone know of a similar VPS provider that a) is responsive in situations like the OP's, and b) is <i>not</i> on the UCEPROTECTL3 email blocklist?<p>I've been happy with DigitalOcean for a while now, but reports like this concern me, and I've also discovered after investigating that the reason MS-hosted email accounts (@hotmail.com, @live.com, etc) reject all emails from my VPS is because the entire provider is on the UCEPROTECT blocklist, and <i>apparently</i> has no interest in changing this.
That's very scary, I am building an MVP currently on DO and although I have daily backups of all the data pushed to another cloud provider as a safety, seeing how they closed your account suddenly out of nowhere with no recourse I feel like I should move out of there.<p>This is insane, if I wouldn't have those backups and the same thing happened to me, I would be screwed. How come they don't contact you beforehand, or at least let you move out your data (keep the account open but cut the droplets from public internet if for whatever reason their algorithm detected nefarious activity on it, or a bogus DMCA, exploits happens, etc).<p>I wanted to try an alternative to AWS but look like I'll be back to it soon. Does AWS have a similar track record of closing account out of the blue? Is there any other alternative that have better support and would at the very least try to contact the owner before taking drastic action like this?
This post made me think about the personal DO droplets I have and how I’m backing them up. I’m currently using the built in back up feature…but that doesn’t protect against DO preventing me from accessing my backups.<p>What does everyone do to easily and automatically back up their side project droplets offsite?
It happened similar to us. A payment arrived late and everything was deleted.
I promised to never use DO again, but the low price makes sense for a small project being made by an indie games company, so here we are again.<p>Luckily for us we added redundancy on payments and alerts, so I hope we won't be in the same case again.
This is par for the course with free services, but this can't be legal if you're a paying customer and have signed agreement with them to provide you services in exchange for payment.
This isn't really a complaint and i was lucky that it was my personal stuff.<p>But somehow a droplet was part of a DDOS and network was booted off ( 1 network spike for 10 minutes). Let's just say it was stressful and very unwelcome at the time.<p>I also went to mention that i did receive feedback and there was definitely a human from their end involved.<p>But, I wouldn't want to imagine what would have happened if it were websites of clients. I took more measures by now, but i think the actual culprit was a contractor that did some work for me.<p>I'm wondering how other providers handle that ( a VPS for example)? Anyone has some insights on how it can be handled better?
This could be written about any cloud provider. I for instance have had a much better time using DO than other cloud services but it’s all anecdotal. If your trying to optimize for customer support buy and run your own datacenter.