Yeah. I'm not proud of it.

Would you explain why you're trying to implicate DO as being in any way "dodgy" or at fault for your own failure to pay them? You got a month of service for free, and they attempted numerous times to contact you about your bill, you just didn't read their emails.

I don’t consider email to be a legal form of communication. Cutting services to a business effectively disabled their business (especially servers). You’d think they would send at least one letter.

> I don’t consider email to be a legal form of communication.

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?

Yep, that’s how things are done with my colo. Real papers. Real signatures. I don’t need to send any letters to spin up a vm though. I just click a button. For new servers, I walk in and plug it in.

For physical hosts that makes perfect sense. It would just be annoying with VM-exclusive providers like DO.

> I don’t consider email to be a legal form of communication

Email is legal in all countries, as far as I'm aware.

It’s very common that EULAs and other contracts explicitly state that the contractual parties agree that email is a valid means for written notifications.

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.)

Lawyers and courts do, however, so what you consider really doesn't matter.

I think they meant their own setup is dodgy, not DO's

It’s not whether or not you are proud that has people upset. They gave you a month of free service and you ignored their attempts to contact you. You are using this incident to paint them in a negative light when they probably gave you more than you deserved in the situation. Your attitude is very entitled for the size of customer you were. If they sent you text messages or letters I would assume you would have ignored those as well based on your prior actions. What exactly would you want them to do here? Free service until they can make contact with you?

I'm not sure I see any criticism of DO in OPs post. They said _their_ setup was dodgy, and _they_ aren't proud of not checking the inbox. Other than that they just explained what happened, no? Looks like a bit of misunderstanding to me