And, regardless of what DO should or should not do, they can do whatever they want with their own hard drives. You should structure your business accordingly.
If there is no police report, then they are trying to act as police themselves, which I think is unacceptable. It is not their data.
Your argument that they can do whatever they want with their hard drives is indeed something I will take care to remember β I definitely would not want to host anything with DO.
The observant will note the particular corner you're backing into here -- that a business might be justified in denying access to code/data being used in literally criminal behavior -- is notably distinct from the general and likely much more common case.
> they can do whatever they want with their own hard drives.
Sure. But to the extent they take that approach, Digital Ocean or any other service is publicly declaring that however affordable they may be for prototyping, they're unsuitable for reliable applications.
Businesses that can be relied on generally instead offer terms of service and processes that don't really allow them to act arbitrarily.
I agree. Look at the absolutism of the comment I am replying to. My whole point is that there might be some nuance to the situation.
> ...Digital Ocean or any other service is publicly declaring that however affordable they may be for prototyping, they're unsuitable for reliable applications.
Again, I agree. Considering how cheap AWS, backblaze, and Google drive is, it is completely ridiculous to depend on any one single hosting service to hold all your data forever and never err.
You seem to be accusing the aggrieved party of being a bad actor, when that is not the case.
And do what in the mean time? The legal system acts slowly. In the age of social media outrage, would you allow the headline "Digital Ocean knew they were serving criminals, and they didn't stop them" if you were CEO?
It's easy to be outraged when these systems and procedures are used against the innocent. That does not mean we should stop using rational thought. If someone is using DO to cause harm, then DO should (be allowed to) stop the harmful actions.
You lock down the image, and let law enforcement do their thing. If law enforcement clear them, you then give the customer access to their data, perhaps for a short time before you cut them off as they seem to be a risky customer to have.
You don't unilaterally make the decision, you offload your responsibility onto the legal process.
The fact that there are hundreds of comments on HN condemning them for this action proves my point.
Seems to work just fine for AWS, Google and Cloudflare. In fact, counter to your argument, Cloudflare got in massive shit when they did decide to play God.
At the very least, they should also provide ALL, as in every last byte, of data, schemas, code, setup etc. to the defenestrated customers. As in: "sorry, we cannot restart your account, but you can download a full backup of your system as of it's last running configuration here: -location xyz-, and all previous backups are available here: -location pdq-".
Anything less is simply malicious destruction of a customer's property.
If you violate a lease and get evicted, they don't keep your furniture & equipment unless you abandon it.
I think it's entirely reasonable for companies to have that option. "You are doing something malicious and against the rules, you have been permanently removed". In this case, that option was misused, but I don't think the existence of that possiblity is inheritly surprising.