Marg DigitalOcean Droplets

Used to like reliability. They have moderate prices and good functionality.

Ok, so I’ve been using DigitalOcean since 2013 and everything was just fine. An on May 31 2018 something really worrying happened, all my files got deleted and I received this email:

“We sincerely apologize, however, there was an incident impacting the Spaces service that resulted in a number of Spaces and the data within them to be deleted. At this time we're performing a full internal investigation to determine what the cause of the issue was as well as why it happened. Once we have a full understanding and additional details to share, we'll follow up.

At this time, unfortunately, we can confirm that the data within your Spaces has been lost and is not recoverable. We deeply apologize for any inconvenience this has caused.”

They never informed me further and none of my files were restore. No compensation except for $400 on my account, saying:

“You have been granted credit to use on your DigitalOcean team for $400.00. We’ve updated your balance, which you can view at your team's billing page. Please note that this credit will expire after 12 months if it's not used.”

I took severe loses… Now I am in the process of transferring to another service.

Well, decide for yourself whether use their services, but I am really devastated by both my losses and their absolute ignorance.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

* Super easy to get up and running fast

* UI/UX is clean & intuitive

* Pricing is transparent

* Competitive entry level price point

* Only pay for what you use

* Support - It's impossible to get anyone on the phone. Tickets are answered in a 1 response every 24 hour cadence. If you're hosting a single, simple SMB website, where responsibilities are shared across a dedicated team, I can being happy with their support. They're really good at copy/pasting well written solutions to common problems. I had an SSH Key Authentication break and found it annoying that "there isn't any other authentication or access options we [DO] can offer" other than taking the server offline, removing the image, and asking me to manually redeploy from scratch. That was annoying, but I get it. Unmanaged hosting an what not. My issue was that I had to open up 4 tickets over the course of a month to get that answer. The first three were either not responded to or closed less than 24 hours after answering a question with a question. That seems to be common practice. Again, if you're sitting around at your computer just waiting for DO support to e-mail you, then that's ok. If you're spinning 14 different plates like Red Panda it's no bueno.

* No Backup/Redundancy Features! - This is reason I chose to leave a poor review. I am currently a Master's Student at Harvard and had been a relatively content DO customer for a little over 2 years. In the midst of my month long struggle inability to SSH into the root directory of my server – which was going on in the middle of finals – DO had issues processing my payment (which barring evidence to the contrary was probably my fault). I responded saying:

"I am interested in keeping my account open, but I need someone to help

identify why I can't access my server. Can you please have someone get back

to me?"

At which time, they opened up a 5th ticket and seemingly unaware of the first 4 responded with:

"Hey there, thanks for reaching out to us! What issues are you experiencing reaching the Droplet? We'd be happy to help in any way we can! :)"

At this point, I'm working 18 hours a day between work and school, and decided to deal with it the end of the month, post exams. Turns out, that was a HUGE MISTAKE! Over a outstanding balance of $23.61 they shut down my server a few days after the above exchange, sent one automated e-mail, and then wiped the server clean 2 later. 2 years of work just vanished forever, completely unrecoverable. I'm not a complete moron. I had personal backups of my major projects, but I did loose a website I created using DO's 1-click WordPress install app. Lost 100+ hours of work and generated content. That whole site was probably less than a MB. I figured they'd at least backup their word press installs the same way most other providers do. Nope.

I take responsibility for what happened. They were within their rights. I just think that's a stupid way of doing business. When I was evaluating providers in a professional capacity a few months, knowing how cavalier they are as a company towards their customers data didn't inspire a lot of confidence. 99 times out of 100 it wouldn't be an issue, but I'm not risking my business on those odds.

The crazy thing to me is, I'd have paid $300 for that backup without batting an eye. I'd still do it 6 months later. Google for one understands this. Anyone notice what happens when you overload you Drive storage limits? They don't cancel your plan, delete your data, or ever stop you from uploading more. They just wait a few months until you drive folder is 370% full and then tell you your e-mail is going to stop working unless you make space or pay more money. That's smart business. And, I guarantee that when they lock user's out of their e-mail accounts they don't close the account or stop storing the data. I guarantee they keep all those e-mails as an incentive to pay.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Web front-end and documentation is awesome.

They restrict outgoing SMTP even for G-suite accounts. Support answering that this cannot be workarounded and you must wait for 60 days.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Digital is a very platform no doubt but price is a issue

Great platform but price issue in my opinion should be fixed

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

The opportunity to collaborate on world issues that are related to a fragile and vital resource

The inter connectivity between tabs and the vagueness of the intention of the project. Sometimes it is hard to know how and when to collaborate and what the overall usefulness is with all the other platforms out there.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?