> especially if first complaint

Well:

> It was sent by PhishLabs to DigitalOcean, and DigitalOcean forwarded it to me.

I don't think this is the first complaint from PhishLabs to DigitalOcean. I do think DO would have "investigated" up to the level where they'd click the link and see "yep, that's a google sign in form". It's not up to DO to dispute claims made by people who send them abuse e-mails. As for the dispute itself, we all seem to think the IPFS was not hosting the content. But I'm not sure if that holds up in a legal case (the PirateBay is also not hosting any illegal content).

IPFS isn't even linking to illegal content.

IPFS has no knowledge of the illegal content whatsoever, it all comes from the URL fragment and Microsoft Azure.

By the same merit, any site (big, small, government or otherwise) with an XSS like el.outerHTML = window.location.search or el.outerHTML = window.location.query is vunerable to be shutdown if hosted on DO. Makes one think..

If you don't want to be nullrouted at the first abuse or DMCA complaint, I recommend more professional hosters like Hetzner or OVH. They will forward abuse mail to you first and only react themselves if you ignore the mails entirely and repeatedly do nothing about it.

You don't have to go Hetzner or OVH to get some sensibility. We've worked with Linode over a somewhat dubious overreaching copyright claim some years ago, they were professional and available and we had some back and forth whilst my client sought legal advice, in the end it wasn't completely frivolous, we had to give an inch instead of a mile the legal compliantee desired. This was over a period of a few days and we were never suspended, we made the small modification, Linode was happy, compliantee went quiet eventually, we carried on...

I wouldn't trust DigitalOcean with this fire first ask questions later approach especially given the technical nature of OPs setup.