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Key takeaway for me: DigitalOcean might still kill your account at any time, revoking your access to your data. Refusing service is fine, but holding my data h

by jwr 7y ago

Key takeaway for me: DigitalOcean might still kill your account at any time, revoking your access to your data. Refusing service is fine, but holding my data hostage and refusing access to it is not, so I am making a note to not consider DO for any kind of hosting.

bepvte 7y ago
Because I reinstalled my droplet with a different filesystem manually, the snapshot restore doesnt work. Support tells me they cant do anything, so my 2~ of chat logs are sitting in a disk image that they cant restore bc they need to mount it for some reason...
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- Sebguer 7y ago
  Hey there! I would love to follow up on the issue you're describing here. It looks like you tried to bring a disk image over from a provider in a format that we don't support, and unfortunately there's nothing trivial we could do to get a working Droplet out of it (which is a requirement for us to expose the volume within the systems we have). I can't promise a super fast resolution - but I'd be happy to work internally to see if there's any outside-the-ordinary workarounds we can supply here if you're willing to follow back up on the ticket.
  - bepvte 7y ago
    I replied to my ticket (#2710287). Thank you so much for giving it a shot by the way.
Jedd 7y ago
I am curious which alternative service providers you use that offer guarantees to never kill your account, and to provide copies of data stored on their infrastructure. (As noted by many observers during the initial event, anyone keeping their data exclusively within one organisation's walls is a profound mistake.)
- solidasparagus 7y ago
  I don't know if it's a promise, but I know from experience that AWS won't kill your account when they automatically detect fraud-like increased usage. They send warnings that the account will be shut down in several days. Because shutting down running servers without warning is completely unacceptable for a B2B infrastructure provider.
  - Jedd 7y ago
    > I don't know if it's a promise ... I suspect that it almost definitely is not. As IT professionals we should do better than use words like 'kill' to describe system and account changes. As I understand it, Digital Ocean suspended the account, and because the (perceived) problem was related to excessive / potentially fraudulent CPU usage, they suspended the machines. The data contained on them was not deleted. Does that match your reading? As someone who suffered from extremely noisy neighbours in AWS (in the very early days), risking significant damage to the performance guarantees to our customers, I'm actually cautiously happy with automated protection systems. Naturally I'd rather noisy neighbours were throttled so that I never heard them, and I expect that's closer to what happens these days
    - solidasparagus 7y ago
      I think 'kill' is appropriate here. They shut down access to his company's account along with all running infrastructure and after escalating multiple times, their final official response (after 30hrs of silence) was that his company was permanently denied access to the account (DO calls it 'account termination' in their postmortem). The first tweet of the thread that went viral was 'How Digital Ocean just killed our company' [https://twitter.com/w3Nicolas/status/1134529316904153089 https://twitter.com/w3Nicolas/status/1134529316904153089]. I don't want to spent too much time dumping on them since they clearly know how badly this situation was handled, but this is an example of terrible automated protection leading to a company that's not enterprise-ready. As you say, AWS probably doesn't publicly promise not to terminate your account, but this would never happen because they understand that availability and security matter more than anything else when running B2B infrastructure.
ummonk 7y ago
If you have illegal content such as hacked / stolen data or child pornography on your account, they absolutely should revoke access to your data.

by jwr 7y ago

bepvte 7y ago

Because I reinstalled my droplet with a different filesystem manually, the snapshot restore doesnt work. Support tells me they cant do anything, so my 2~ of chat logs are sitting in a disk image that they cant restore bc they need to mount it for some reason...

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
Sebguer 7y ago
Hey there! I would love to follow up on the issue you're describing here. It looks like you tried to bring a disk image over from a provider in a format that we don't support, and unfortunately there's nothing trivial we could do to get a working Droplet out of it (which is a requirement for us to expose the volume within the systems we have). I can't promise a super fast resolution - but I'd be happy to work internally to see if there's any outside-the-ordinary workarounds we can supply here if you're willing to follow back up on the ticket.
- bepvte 7y ago
  I replied to my ticket (#2710287). Thank you so much for giving it a shot by the way.

Jedd 7y ago

I am curious which alternative service providers you use that offer guarantees to never kill your account, and to provide copies of data stored on their infrastructure. (As noted by many observers during the initial event, anyone keeping their data exclusively within one organisation's walls is a profound mistake.)

solidasparagus 7y ago
I don't know if it's a promise, but I know from experience that AWS won't kill your account when they automatically detect fraud-like increased usage. They send warnings that the account will be shut down in several days. Because shutting down running servers without warning is completely unacceptable for a B2B infrastructure provider.
- Jedd 7y ago
  > I don't know if it's a promise ... I suspect that it almost definitely is not. As IT professionals we should do better than use words like 'kill' to describe system and account changes. As I understand it, Digital Ocean suspended the account, and because the (perceived) problem was related to excessive / potentially fraudulent CPU usage, they suspended the machines. The data contained on them was not deleted. Does that match your reading? As someone who suffered from extremely noisy neighbours in AWS (in the very early days), risking significant damage to the performance guarantees to our customers, I'm actually cautiously happy with automated protection systems. Naturally I'd rather noisy neighbours were throttled so that I never heard them, and I expect that's closer to what happens these days
  - solidasparagus 7y ago
    I think 'kill' is appropriate here. They shut down access to his company's account along with all running infrastructure and after escalating multiple times, their final official response (after 30hrs of silence) was that his company was permanently denied access to the account (DO calls it 'account termination' in their postmortem). The first tweet of the thread that went viral was 'How Digital Ocean just killed our company' [https://twitter.com/w3Nicolas/status/1134529316904153089 https://twitter.com/w3Nicolas/status/1134529316904153089]. I don't want to spent too much time dumping on them since they clearly know how badly this situation was handled, but this is an example of terrible automated protection leading to a company that's not enterprise-ready. As you say, AWS probably doesn't publicly promise not to terminate your account, but this would never happen because they understand that availability and security matter more than anything else when running B2B infrastructure.

ummonk 7y ago

If you have illegal content such as hacked / stolen data or child pornography on your account, they absolutely should revoke access to your data.