Stop using Digital Ocean Now For the greater good

Our privacy policy prevents us from disclosing any account or personal information so we can not speak to this customers situation publicly.<p>If the customer would authorize this disclosure then we can discuss it publicly.<p>Otherwise, as much as it pains us to get negative feedback, whether or not it is deserved, it is beyond our control as the privacy of our customers is the most important issue at stake in a public discussion.

This doesn&#x27;t actually tell me to not use Digital Ocean. All it tells me is that the author is trying to make an emotional appeal to other people, without giving any information other than Digital Ocean locked his account, citing violation of their TOS.<p>While I can&#x27;t say that they&#x27;re TOS violation claim is bogus, I also can&#x27;t say it&#x27;s not bogus, because the author didn&#x27;t publish (or, apparently, ask) for that information.<p>Great, you&#x27;ve got a large number of users, and you used Digital Ocean to host your backend. Why are they saying you&#x27;re in violation of the TOS?<p>Ask the follow up, figure out why they&#x27;re not pleased with you, and don&#x27;t try to appeal to emotion when you have no substantiating information.<p>As a side note, I have no horse in this race. I don&#x27;t use Digital Ocean, and I have no affiliation with them. I just don&#x27;t see the author&#x27;s claim as being 100% put together and honest.

Notice that the author doesn&#x27;t address the issue of whether they actually were violating the TOS and&#x2F;or AUP, or what the alleged violations actually were. My interpretation is that the author likely was legitimately violating the TOS, because otherwise he would have mentioned how dumb the allegations are.<p>If the author was breaking the AUP, I don&#x27;t feel very sorry for him. If someone&#x27;s doing something that legitimately violates acceptable use, they probably should be shut down without prior notification.

I&#x27;ve just skimmed over the TOS. It seems a bit atypical:<p>&gt; DigitalOcean reserves the right to modify the Terms of Service without notice.<p>Well... that more or less invalidates the sanctity of the terms.<p>&gt; DigitalOcean also reserves the right to terminate a customers account if they are targeted by malicious activity from other parties.<p>What is the justification for that? Simply being the target of malicious activity means that your account can be terminated? It&#x27;s not as though one is responsible for malicious activity directed against them.<p>&gt; DIGITALOCEAN DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES, EXPRESS, IMPLIED, OR STATUTORY, REGARDING THE SERVICES PROVIDED HEREUNDER, INCLUDING ANY WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ...<p>I see this a lot with software, but doesn&#x27;t this mean that DigitalOcean has no actual obligation to provide the cloud or VPS services they advertise? I didn&#x27;t see any such clause in the EC2 TOS, but I did not look very hard.<p>Is this the usual sort of agreement for such a service?

This happened to a friend who runs a DO server on July 22nd. The server had been running for several weeks when it was suddenly taken down out of nowhere for over 4 hours to &quot;verify&quot; the account. There wasn&#x27;t any warning and my friend immediately provided what they had requested.<p>Their response? They shut down the server because of &quot;unusual traffic&quot; coming from the server which wasn&#x27;t even being used yet.. but there was &quot;outbound traffic about 977.38 Mbps at its peak at around 2013-07-22 14:50:00UTC&quot;<p>They need to fully verify accounts before letting anyone create a server. You shouldn&#x27;t just take down a server out of nowhere, for several hours, after it&#x27;s been running for weeks.

I&#x27;ve been unfortunate enough to be DDOS-ed on both linode and digital ocean for some of my sites. suffice to say, linode handles the ddos much more gracefully than digital ocean. digital ocean promptly bans you for TOS violation and locks your account after 3 DDOS attempts. I know most people don&#x27;t have sites that are DDOS-ed often, but if you do run that risk, just know that digital ocean will most likely have you moving pretty quickly.

I sure wouldn&#x27;t mind hearing the other side of the story. I use DO for a few servers and recommend their services to people all the time.

Using a smiling icon like the fish and then issuing a copypaste&#x2F;boilerplate message is insulting. If you are going to deliver non-informing messages, do not SMILE in you icon.<p>This is nitpicking but in the end, you (DO) have a smiling icon because you expect you support group smiles. If your support group is a machine, well then... use this one.<p><pre><code> ## ## ############## #### ###### #### ###################### ## ############## ## ## ## ## ## #### ####</code></pre>

&quot;Please Provide us with the following: ... 1. Your public Twitter handle 2. Your blog 3. Your company or personal website 4. Your public Facebook profile&quot;<p>What? Is this a common procedure now?

Yes, let&#x27;s refuse to support a company that is held in fairly high regard because of one data point, displayed in a highly one-sided way

I think their service being so cheap is more reason for a plan B in case one of your accounts go down. There are so many options for making this happen. And again, all pretty cheap. With a good back-up &#x2F; fail-over plan, this shouldn&#x27;t even be much of a blip. Personally, I never contact support. If I have a problem with one provider, I&#x27;m a button push &#x2F; command line command away from moving everything over to another provider.

I run my website on a DO VPS. I have been supremely satisfied with the service.<p>Did you find out what the breach of terms of service they spoke about was? Unless I missed it the article...

There are many illegal things you can do with a web server, and this puts the hosting company at risk<p>1- Host&#x2F;distribute copyrighted material<p>2- Run a torrent client and distribute copyrighted material<p>3- DOS attacks (especially when you can create several droplets for a limited period of time)<p>The hosting provider is like a bank, and has the right to ask you where you got that information from; and for what you are using it (though a bank doesn&#x27;t ask you what you use your money for)<p>I think it&#x27;s acceptable that the hosting provider ask for your activity and you provide a response for that (which you didn&#x27;t).

Either way, this is NOT how you deal with a customer who supposedly violated terms and conditions. That email response was atrocious. Arrogant and bullying. No sensitivity to whatever plight he may have, or reprieve offered. No &#x27;we&#x27;ll call you directly&#x27;. Nothing! I am about to make a BIG decision for my company and DO was in the discussion. It is not, not! Companies like this irritate the heck out of me and have no place doing business on a large scale. Keep up the attitude boys! ;)

Situations like this will keep getting worse and worse with our current attitude towards personal data on cloud. My personal thought on situations like this has always been that locking somebody&#x27;s data is both unethical and should be considered a crime by law. Service providers have full rights to refuse providing servicing to somebody but they don&#x27;t have a right to seize somebody&#x27;s personal data.

Still waiting for an answer from raiyu. On my point of view, the problem is here DO did not notify DO user before blocking their account. It&#x27;s an unexpected situation for business owners. As sdogruyol mentioned he has 25K users responsible for. At least he deserves a meaningful explanation and a notification before blocking his account.

It&#x27;s irrelevant, I suppose, but I&#x27;m sorta curious how big this database was (or, more specifically, how much traffic he was generating to Dropbox).<p>There was also no mention in this article (except in one of the screenshots) about whatever -- &quot;[a] UDP flood or so&quot; &quot;at the beginning of this month&quot;.<p>It would certainly suck to have your account locked out when you&#x27;re serving production sites but it sounds like we haven&#x27;t heard all of the story (we obviously haven&#x27;t heard DO&#x27;s, of course).

Anyone still lingering here will probably want to see the new post from OP: <a href="http://serdardogruyol.com/?p=137" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;serdardogruyol.com&#x2F;?p=137</a> and the corresponding discussion: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6447152" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=6447152</a>. DO has responded directly.

I run a site on DO for about 2 months - last week I got a similar mail to &quot;verify&quot; my account. Luckily they had not taken down my droplet. I am willing to give them the benefit of doubt here - but I am preparing my Plan B right now in case they decide to &quot;verify&quot; me again and take my server down.<p>We really need to hear from DO to hear the other side of the story though.

Probably they &quot;think&quot; (never thought that I would use it in the IT world) that you are running some torrent client or anything like that. It&#x27;s very common in EU to use this kind of hosts to download torrents and avoid problems with the law

My (a couple weeks old) Ubuntu 10.04 server locked up, no ssh or VPN access but could ping it. I contacted support and was told to destroy the droplet and create a new one. Still have no idea why it happened or how to avoid it on my production server.

For $5 Digital Ocean gives me 20 GB of storage. But Dreamhost shared hosting gives me UNLIMITED disk storage for the same price. Does this mean that I should write off VPS&#x2F;dedicated servers since they give such poor disk space?

By this standard nobody should use Google, Paypal and many other services.

On a side note, I looked through that database dumper script and isn&#x27;t it just a giant hassle to script non-interactive authentications with OAuth? Hope I never have to do that again.

Dumping your DB daily to dropbox doesnt sound like a production solution. It looks like you violated their TOC somehow but dont state what you did.<p>This honestly sounds like growing pains, now that we are &quot;taking off&quot; we need to make sure users arent abusing our service. Lets do a user verification process for certain instances that are flagged for whatever reason.<p>I have experienced similar verify account problems with Pay Pal&#x2F;eBay. While its a burden on people who are doing legitimate business, if it keeps spammers&#x2F;scammers off of a service then it is worth it.

If I stop using any hosting provider that someone has complained about online, what exactly are my options now?

So OP went public, then claimed he didn&#x27;t want to go public (deleted message) but still encourages people to drop DO based on his unhappiness..<p>Op seems very childish and not very forthcoming.

Good to know, I&#x27;ll migrate and spread the word, this is not acceptable.