DO should have done something like that as well, just cutting off service because you sent some emails is kinda shitty.
DO should abide by the law of the country they operate in. If that means they can shut off services for non-payment then that's what they're entitled to do. By the sounds of it they gave plenty of warning and 30 days service they weren't getting paid for.
Email is the expected form of business communication in 2023. I don't think any of the hosts I use even have my physical address. Maybe they could SMS me. I doubt they have my phone number either though.
I would expect a billing warning notice when I SSH into the service though. Maybe that was in place for the 30 days before they shut the customer out. I certainly hope so.
I think that + allowing customers to add more than one credit card to an account are reasonable suggestions. Maybe they do that now - this was 7 years ago.
I'm not trying to shirk responsibility though. We didn't, for example, pass the buck by telling our customers our site was offline because of DO.
Not proactively updating expired cards is dodgy. Supplying an unmonitored email address as a contact address is dodgy. Cutting service after non-payment, email warnings, and grace period is normal and expected.
I can appreciate how terrible must have been to suddenly find all your servers shut down, and I understand how easy it is to set up billing and forget, especially with the day to day stress of running a startup, but what would you have done if you were DO?
> our site was offline because of DO.
Or maybe it's because of the bank that expired your credit card?
I would not expect Digital Ocean to alter the MOTD configuration of my Linux box because I forget to check my emails. That would be an invasion of privacy in my opinion.
What is this? Germany?
For larger businesses with thousands of dollars of revenue per month? Sure. For small $50 charges? No way.
Your example seems to be unrelated, although it sounds frustrating.
Fair enough, but that's why I was saying your experience seemed to not be relevant to the topic.
If you have an account manager or sales folk in the cloud org, IOW have a high spend, you get the twitter experience. If you don’t, and are a self-serve customer spending a pretty low amount like in this case and missed a payment and ignored the account emails reminding you to pay… what exactly is the provider supposed to do? I mean this in the nicest way possible but they aren’t so desperate for your business that they’re going to beat down your door so you can pay before you get shutdown. Important to keep in mind, if you don’t have a long payment history, you don’t look that different from a user that’s just trying to get something for free, and without paying for the communication channel, you also can resemble a company that just went bankrupt or something (which often creates a huge risk for the cloud provider if the cloud creds get sold by some disgruntled ex employee to crypto miners).
Source: I worked in this area at a major public cloud provider
Why not? If the phone companies here can extend that courtesy to normal consumers then I find it ridiculous to suggest that a cloud provider couldn't afford to do the same.
The using of an unmonitored email is the one that really gets to me.
The flipside of requiring a provider to submit paperwork to terminate your service, is the situation where in order to setup a new server with DO you'd have to file paperwork yourself. Can you imagine sending a paper letter every time you need to spin up a VM?
Which one do you prefer? paperwork in both directions or no paperwork?
Email is legal in all countries, as far as I'm aware.
I used to work for a SaaS firm. Every once in awhile the main office would receive a written and signed letters from (primarily) German users when they wanted to terminate their service. (We accepted that after confirmation using an authenticated email address, of course.)
But they aren't paying anymore!
Account management involves a lot of discussion and your account manager will keep the service running if they think the bill will eventually get paid.
It’s like saying car is a shitty transportation service because it stops working once the gas runs out.
Not paying attention the the reserve light, instrument msg and pings is solely your problem. More so because you are running a business…
Computers, on the other hand, are perfectly happy to use an expired timer to generate mail, a dashboard icon, or any other shout for attention that you please -- as long as you actually set it up. Paying attention to it is still a human problem.
I'd say you're dead right -- this is the only safe assumption. And any email client smart enough to check incoming email against a regexp could be extended to raise a not-easily-ignored alert if no pattern match (indicating success in processing a payment) had arrived by some chosen date of the month. Yet I've never come across such a feature in Gmail, Fastmail, nor Thunderbird. Maybe someone sometime has hacked such a thing into Gnus ...
Merchant payment services exist that can automatically obtain the updated card-on-file credential when they are about to expire.
Both Visa and Mastercard offer this directly, or you can get the same service from a PSP.
We have this at work thanks to Stripe, and it’s wildly inconsistent. But beyond that, it won’t do anything for a closed/canceled card/cardholder account.
That situation was fully on OP. This could have happened at GCP, AWS, Azure, Linode, OVH, Rackspace, Oracle Cloud, you name it.
Well seen that the tech exists, they're not just leaving money on the table by not using it (to update card that just expired) but they're also burning money on pointless support, support which wouldn't need to happen in the first place had they updated the month/year of expiration.
I mean: we're literally talking about credit cards often keeping the exact same owner name, the very same number and just having their MM/YY of expiration changed. It's not rocket science to update in a DB after an API call. And what's the catch on at least trying? If it works, you saved everybody time. If it doesn't work, it's not worse than your current "solution".
I understand politicians and lawyer-minded people saying: "technically it's not our responsibility" but they're wasting everybody's time, leaving money on the table and wasting money on support.
It's just poor judgment to react like that instead of thinking as to how life could be made better for everybody, starting with your paying customers (which, btw, are the reason you exist).
Are they at fault because their customer dropped the ball so badly about paying their bill? No.
To lend a bit of insight as someone who works in the payments industry: This functionality is generally not free.
If most of your customers come and update their expired cards already - or you offer a service which is so essential to your customers that they generally would freely expend the effort to do so if notified, it doesn't make any sense from a financial standpoint to pay the fees to subscribe to card issuer updates.
It's not as seamless as you're making it sound.
No need to use email at all.
This wasn’t *at all* their fault and there’s nothing dodgy about it. This was entirely your fault, and even mentioning this as a „partly“ negative for DO is imo very wrong. I imagine any other service provider, including Heroku, would have acted the same way. You can’t expect to mooch off a month of service without paying and without consequences. If you don’t pay your bills, service will be interrupted. It’s as simple as that.