While this sounds frustrating, I wouldn't ever put anything that required high availability on DigitalOcean. DigitalOcean is great because they are cheap & simple to get stuff setup - not because they are robust and redundant.

But is this anything to do with "cheap & simple" vs a takedown notice that resulted in the entire server been taken offline? Redundancy really has nothing to do with this?

i.e. would another provider have acted differently?

If you host all your websites on a single box - then is there an expectation on a server provider to get an engineer to go into the box to turn off "one" site - vs just turn off the box?

Yes that's a good point! This seems to be simply a case of bad customer service rather than bad technology. I guess Another reason not to use DigitalOcean for projects requiring high availability I suppose.

Yeah its basically a VPS provider, with all the connotations that come with that.

What provider will be good option then?

There are quite a few and of course it depends on your needs. Personally I like AWS and SoftLayer. They both have world class data centers and tons of different advanced ways to build and configure systems, numerous availability zones across the globe, etc.

DigitalOcean is a really wonderful, cheap, and performant solution for rapid prototyping and other projects where you don't want to be burdened with unnecessary complexity or high costs. I often use a DigitalOcean droplet as a personal development environment for this reason.

However, I don't think DigitalOcean is a great fit for enterprise systems or for projects that are ready to start planting deep roots. In other words, it's probably a bad fit for someone looking to provide hosting for 38k sites.

Sorry my ignorance but AWS is not unreliable? I hear all time (ie, here in hknews) that is down and that lost of data in catastrophic ways... or things have improved.

Plus, look like more complex, so I assume, more things to break...

If it's a parody site hopefully surge has the resources to sue NRA for fraudulent take down .

It doesn't sound like the NRA didn't take down Surge, though. The hosting provider/Cloudflare did.

Not a DMCA takedown request apparently:

"@Sarterus @xor according to @digitalocean we needed to remove b/c of "trademark in general". DMCA was not cited as the reason to remove." -- Brock Whitten (‏@sintaxi) at https://twitter.com/xor/status/748317104965750785

This same thing happened back in December/January, when a DMCA for "trademark infringement" was sent and DO took surge offline: https://medium.com/surge-sh/more-on-january-7th-downtime-the...

Forwarded this via slack to a friend that works there though I am sure they are already working on this issue.

Isn't the cloud awesome?

DMCA takedowns and the like affect baremetal providers and colos too