DO has shown that their service is simply not suitable for some use cases: those that impose an "unreasonable" load on their infraestructure.

Even worse: they don't explicitly state what is considered "unreasonable". So, if your business is serious, you have to assume the worst-case scenario: DO can't be used for anything

Conclusion: Digital Ocean is just for testing, playing around, not suitable for production.

> Conclusion: Digital Ocean is just for testing, playing around, not suitable for production.

I think that's always been the standard position most people take. DO, Linode, etc are for personal side projects, hosting community websites, forums etc. They are not for running a real business on. Some people do, sure but if hosting cost is really that big a portion of your total budget you probably don't have a real business model yet anyway.

I am of the impression that people rent cloud services because they can expense the cost to someone else or because of an inability to plan long term or a need of low latency.

That's the kind of response you only send when you're convinced the customer is actually nefarious and you don't care about losing them. I wonder if there is any missing backstory here or if it really is just a case of mistaken analysis.

> Don't really blame Digital Ocean for the accidental locking

I find it concerning that they have such a low threshold for triggering a lock. 10 droplets is hardly cloud scale.

Used to work at Linode, let's flip this on it's head:

-When the majority of abuse support dealt with was people angrily calling and asking about the fraudulent charges on their cards for dozens of Lie-nodes you consider putting caps in place to reduce support burden and reduce chargebacks.

At the time at Linode, if it was a known customer, we could easily and quickly raise that limit and life is good.

I've always wondered how Amazon dealt with fraud/abuse at their scale.

I don't think DO was wrong here to have a lock, but the post lock procedure seemed to be the problem.

That response is ice cold. Reminds me of suspension emails Amazon sends out to their FBA sellers.

That's the sort of response you get from Twitter or Facebook, where you are not paying for the service.

Agreed. I actually had to reread that a few times because I could not believe that someone actually approved of that text.

That text suggests larger organizational problems within the company.

If you explain why, you give the actual abusers clues as to how to avoid detection. It's common place behaviour for companies to _not_ reveal details.

You can provide a helpful message with options for recourse without giving abuser's "clues." These are not somehow mutually exclusive. By your logic it makes sense to punish a marginal element at the expense of the majority.

It's a spectrum; being opaque and stone-cold to that degree is shitty customer service.

I think the major issue there is process and management related. The account should have been reviewed by someone with the authority to activate it, and it definitely shouldn't have been flagged a second time. But looks like DO thought the user was malicious, and issues raised by malicious users don't get much information. The response was horrible though.