Hey Nkozyra - Zach here from DO Support. One of our remediation efforts, that is already underway, is that Support and Security Operations leadership will create new workflows to allow abuse-related events to leverage the 24/7 structure of Support.

On Support, we have additional Support Engineers joining our Developer Experience team in mid-June and early July. We will continually assess our ability to provide high-quality responses as fast as possible to all tickets. Our customer feedback will continue to be the measure of how well we're doing, but our goal is that no one will ever need to use social as an escalation path.

I've been using DO spaces for about a year now, and for the later half of that time, my experience has been pretty terrible.

- Spaces throwing up errors that magically fix itself a couple of days later.

- Asking about the credits we were promised for when Spaces lost our files results in the question being ignored. Still haven't received the promised credits for 6+ months. I can't even look back at the tickets now as the support system has deleted all the tickets older than a month.

It's gotten to the point where we have started work on migrating off DO, which is unfortunate because DO's offerings looked very attractive.

Hi Sladey - Zach here from DO. I'd like to help you out and investigate what might be going on. Can you send me an email (first name at) and I'll investigate right away?

Thank you, Zach

In what way is DigitalOcean a "huge company"? At ~300 employees, it's closer to the SMB's definition of a small business (<250 employees) than mid-size (<500 employees).

In all fairness, having worked at a few tech startups, it can be hard to scale customer service to keep up with demand—you don't control how many support tickets come in, and it takes a lot more time to hire and train new customer service agents than it does to spin up new servers, and if you over-hire, it's a lot more costly than shutting down some servers.

DO is claimed to be "third-largest hosting company in the world in terms of web-facing computers", so that should give you an idea of how many customers they have.

How do they manage so many boxes with so few people? Do they rent metal and resell it with value add software?

By skimping out on support, clearly.

Oh interesting, hadn't seen that claim before

I feel like a better measure for the "size" of a tech company is number of customers, rather than number of employees. Considering software doesn't need a linearly increasing number of people to produce/support it as your share of the market gets bigger.

It doesn’t scale linearly, but we’re all here discussing in this thread because scaling support is hard.

I had wondered if they were a large company or not. I have used them in the past and there was a specific reason that we picked them over AWS/Azure/Goober, but those details escape me.

Based on the other comments, they don't sound like a huge company. Someone mentioned about 300 employees. I am not sure their revenue and chuckled at the reference that they're "third largest" given some specific criteria (of course, "largest" doesn't mean anything, either -- what we're really looking for is "third best" by some criteria that we've defined in our head)

I found this: https://www.canalys.com/newsroom/cloud-market-share-q4-2018-...

That jives more with other things I've read and anecdotal experience.

I think the size of the company is less relevant than the last point that you make about the clear issues around training/support. At a company that size, CSR training might be less formal than it needs to be. When a one-off like a customer who is legitimate but in every other way appears to be fraud might involve a slack messages to people with wrong information rather than clear guidance followed up with formal training.

It's difficult for a smaller (average cash-flow for their size) company to succeed in highly competitive markets that are, effectively, commodities. A larger company can handle being a loss leader to knock smaller competitors out of the market, providing excellent customer service. They don't. But it'd be easier for them to do so. :)