> 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.