"But why was I paying them for backups that they wiped along with my server?"

The issue seems to have been that you weren't.

Paid them for four years. If I had known they were going to delete the backups in just over one month, I wouldn’t have risked that.

Lost everything when they deleted the backups. They turned off the server on the same day, and it was running fine right up until then. Zero warning other than the emails I didn’t see.

So you didn't pay attention to the emails, didn't pay them, then get mad when they don't store data for free for you? Ok...

How should they get ahold of you? A call that you don't answer? A letter that goes unopened? African swallow laden with a note that you don't see?

Keep backups elsewhere. Regardless of cloud provider or payment terms or whatever. 3-2-1 backups.

Store backups for a little while and charge a fee (high enough to make this service profitable) to release them.

A customer for 4 years and they delete everything after 5 weeks? Can you really defend that? It's pretty clearly a bad policy. You're being facetious about other contact methods, but I think that's a great idea. Allow users to add a phone number. Some people have faulty spam email blockers.

I had a similar situation, but, a completely different outcome.

I had my wallet stolen on one of my work trips, and had all of my credit cards deactivated and new numbers issued. Digital Ocean's emails went to my "bulk" folder, and I missed the notifications saying that they were going to disable, then deactivate my service.

What caught my attention was one of the support guys emailing me and saying basically, "Hey, I see that you've been a customer for a long time -- we're going to give you 30 more days to fix this (and btw, you still owe us for your services so far) before we delete everything."

That support interaction -- that wasn't flagged as spam -- is literally what kept my data, and it keeps me using Digital Ocean: amazing support.

How long to hold it for though? If say 90% of customers that haven’t paid for 5 weeks end up never paying that is resources they will never recover the cost for.

What they could do is work out some high restore cost which makes the numbers work on holding all that data for longer.

You keep it until x days/weeks after the servers are deactivated. Where the emails are going unnoticed, the servers getting cut off usually is noticed straight away. The story here appears to be that the backups were deleted at the same time as the servers. For the relatively small cost of those who don't subsequently pay up, you get a lot of goodwill from the majority who just messed up.

When an account on DO is late with a payment, you go through three stages: hold, suspension, termination.

The hold happens right away and prevents you from creating new billable resources.

Then a suspension happens several weeks later, which powers off your servers.

You don’t get terminated until a couple weeks after that, at which point the data is irretrievable.

The time between each stage can vary depending on how long you’ve been a customer or what your monthly payments in the past have been, but that’s the gist of it.

It'd be nice if one could pay a bit more in advance, so one's data stayed some weeks or months longer than default, after the servers got powered off. — As an extra safety net, if the credit card expires when one is in bed for a month with a broken leg or some bad luck thing like that.

Did they attempt to contact you in those 5 weeks?

A lot of people seem willing to blame you without knowing the answer to this question.

On a different note, this kind of thing is probably one of the top threats to the survivability of a cloud-powered site or service. Alongside vandalism by disgruntled (ex-)employees, I imagine it happens far more often than outages in cloud providers' infrastructure.

They did. My issue was the timing. They turned off the server and deleted everything, including the backups, in a single day.

In contrast, I haven’t paid Dropbox for years and my data is all still there.

I'd rather have lower cost DO than pay to subsidize people who forget to pay for over a month. If you want that, use Dropbox.

The gall. I will never understand this mentality.

The point of backups is that they still exist after something went wrong. Something went wrong, the backups didn't exist, DO didn't do the job it was paid for.

DigitalOcean isn't obligated to store your data free of charge, which is what you're suggesting.

I'm not talking about non-customers of DO which is what you're suggesting.

I don't see that it matters. Storing data isn't free. Why should they be expected to do so in the absence of payment?

You do understand what a backup is?

Hello @MaxBarraclough and @anoncake,

Is there a simple solution for this?

DO reserves say $20 (just an example) when one spins up a new droplet, and if one forgets to pay — then, DO shuts down the server. But keeps the backups, until the GB-month cost is $20.

One could choose how much money to reserve, depending on how important the data one stored on the droplet, was. If it's just for running test: $0. Customer data: Maybe $$$ instead.

There could be a default that made the data and backup last for 2 or 3 months?

And any remaining money would be refunded, if one closes one's account or sth like that.

* * *

Actually I'll look into implementing this, in my own SaaS (which, like DO, takes monthly recurring payments and stores customer data).

I believe a solution like this is an elegant way to ensure that the customer gets what they 'believe' they are buying which is a sure-fire way to keep the customer happy.

The other folks here are giving you a hard time, so I'll just say I actually see things differently here. Things get overlooked, card expiration dates being one of them. Deleting a backup after such a short time is really poor form. Especially because these backups only exist because people need contingencies for machine and human error. Sending a threatening email 'fix your CC in 60 days or everything goes bye-bye' is preferable for almost everyone in this situation, and the difference in cost to DO would be negligible.

DO sends an email when they can't charge. They send a second email 21 days later, when the account gets suspended (which doesn't deleted anything), with essentially your message, except it's 14 days instead of 60.

It's five weeks really poor form but eight acceptable? Seems a bit subjective.

What about this:

DO reserves say $20 (just an example) when one spins up a new droplet, and if one forgets to pay — then, DO shuts down the server. But keeps the backups, until the GB-month cost is $20.

One could choose how much money to reserve, depending on how important the data one stored on the droplet, was. If it's just for running test: $0. Customer data: Maybe $$$ instead.

There could be a default that made the backups stay for 3 months?

Any remaining money could be refunded, whenever one wants.

(also "cross-posted/replied" here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22094218 )

6-week vacations aren't that uncommon, which is a scenario I would expect to encounter if I was DO. If that email doesn't get seen for 6 weeks it definitely shouldn't result in all backups being deleted. Beyond that, it's not unreasonable to imagine health issues or other external circumstances putting someone out of commission for 6 weeks (or even more, making it quite subjective).

All in all, from the moment of non-payment to the moment that everything you have on their servers is gone shouldn't be less than 90 days in my personal opinion. If that raised the cost of my backups by a few dollars, so be it. The backups are there to account for things I may not have been able to consider.

> 6-week vacations aren't that uncommon

I would love to live on the planet you live on

I may have said vacations, but people take time off work for any number of reasons. Paternity/Maternity leave, health, family needs, and so on. I had a 2-month lapse when I moved from Germany to the United States for example.

If there were, for any reason, an internal lapse in communication or processes (imagine small companies...) that could result in a pretty sour situation.

A different continent, not planet :- )

5 or 6 weeks vacation per year, + about 1 or 2 more weeks in total, because of Christmas, NYE etc, is how things work in Scandinavia.

(I feel curious about how things are, where you live )

This discussion could be easily settled by comparing the grace period to the ones provided by Vultr and Linode. Then compare all of them to Amazon, which I would bet blows everyone else out.

This is a huge fear of mine. I tend to do month-long "research" stints where I cut myself off from the world. But I'm yet to set up any backups outside of DO. Also a fear with losing domain names because with namecheap you can't set up any "backup" payment method.

> But why was I paying them for backups that they wiped along with my server?

Sounds like you weren't paying for backups.

tl;dr - customer stops paying service provider, and service provider stops providing services. Customer is upset.

This one's on you.

I haven't decided whether DO did the right thing or not, but to be fair, your analogy should be more in the line of "they evicted me and burned everything of mine in the apartment".

But landlords kind of do that... there’s even an entire TV show dedicated to it, called Storage Wars. People didn’t pay the bill for their storage locker so the owners of the locker sell off all the stuff inside.

Context really matters though. Is the storage locker being bidded off because the owner died 5 years ago? What if the last payment was 8 months ago, and you haven't heard from the owner since?

It's a completely different story if you were late by 1 day and they sold all your stuff the next day.

I guess the question here is if DO waited long enough before deleting their droplet. They were over a month late, and I'm assuming they sent notifications....

This analogy would make more sense if it wasn't trivial to make and store exact clones of your apartment and its contents in minutes, if not seconds.