I work with OwainX and he is having some issues with his HN account right now. He wanted to make sure that you know he heard your comment and an Expire Now option is coming for servers on the free plan later today!
I'm Zach, Director of Support here at DigitalOcean. Thanks for raising this topic.
I was able to locate your account, and I see that I was the one who granted the credit and followed up via email. I hadn't heard back from you until now, and I'm happy that we have an open line of communication. I'm hopeful that this thread starts a conversation, that it clarifies what steps we take, and we might even uncover a different solution that works well for everyone.
To start with, I want to be really clear, this is the absolute worst case scenario. I absolutely don't want it to happen to any customer, let alone someone who has been with us for such a long time. There's really a delicate balance that we must strike between customers who forget to pay and customers who do not want to pay.
Currently, our notifications for overdue balances are sent via email. If a customer account is unpaid on the first of the month, we send ~15 emails total notifying the customer of the situation, and subsequently power off servers 21 days after the account is on hold as a further way to gain your attention. At this time, droplets are removed from your account 14 days following power off, which is an increased amount of time from what you experienced. It was increased from 3 days based on past user feedback.
Why do we do it this way? In the past, we had no hold or suspension process for non-payment, which enabled bad actors to run for months and months without paying. From a business perspective, we made a decision to put a scalable process in place that limited how long an account could go unpaid.
As a support team and business, we are always willing to work with our customers who are unable to pay. We are always available via ticket, our contact form, and have made wide-ranging attempts to help users who aren't able to pay due to banking regulations: https://insidedigitalocean.com...
I'd like some input, so I'll publicly ask for feedback on questions that I've asked privately before. I'd also like any other feedback that we can consider on how to make this a more positive experience for everyone
-Knowing that we do not do phone support, what's the best way to notify you of a past-due balance?
-Is SMS effective at times like this?
Just to clarify, DigitalOcean does not offer any form of DoS mitigation services so they blackhole during a DoS. Its for 3 hours, a lot less than other providers.
If you've got a DoS issue, you definitely need a 3rd party DoS protection service. Cloudflare free works pretty well
It's not "a lot less than other providers". You know what happens when someone starts DDOSing one of my AWS servers? I get a CloudWatch alert saying "high inbound traffic" and that's it. They don't black hole the thing and cut off all traffic. Then, I can log in, see what's happening, and take my time diagnosing the problem. Even under a fairly heavy DDOS I never feared losing access. With DO, the black hole happens before the email alert. It's a terrible policy and I can't use or recommend DO until it's changed. I can't stick CloudFlare in front of every server I own.
They regularly are unable to create new droplets [or other control issues where you can't perform normal functions with normal latency] and/or have full DC outages.
Pretty much any use case where I'd use something like DO being unable to create new VMs, etc. is the same as an outage.
I asked why as I work for DO's operations team and I wanted to know what your concerns were. Do you have a specific instance of a problem? What you're describing would be considered a MAJOR outage for us and we have not had one in quite some time.
That is annoying enough I'd want to be able to failover if it exceeded 15 minutes. I get it might not be an issue for anyone else but failing over is less complex than mitigating latency issues with droplet creation or whatever.
I get "regularly" to me might mean something different to you but if the 2 DO DCs I was using are hit literally every month with a problem of some kind...it seems regular to me.
Symphony showing up on the front page of HN was a total surprise to me today. As a sole developer my focus right now is on the new build and next month's release. I agree that the site is way to sparse and could be much better (it was thrown together in one evening) but focusing on the site would only take away from the limited time I have available to work on the distro itself. If after the January release I am able to get a few more developers involved I would love to improve the site, documentation and community around the project.
Get a volunteer on it. Someone who wants visibility and to develop some documentation skills. You stay with the main focus. Your HN exposure has convinced me to try the iso!!
Absolutely. Right now I am heads down to get the new rewrite released in January. Then the focus will be back on building the community, bringing on some more volunteer developers and putting together good documentation.
With FreeBSD, in order to be able to have automatic backups work, we were required to disable journaling on the disk. This will cause the disk speed to be much slower than our Linux distributions.
I just use Vultr and install from a FreeBSD downloaded ISO. No modifications to the base install at all and works as expected.
DO have screwed something up with their configuration if they need to make so many changes to make it work. No other VPS provider I have used that support FreeBSD (or OpenBSD for that matter) require any changes to the default install.
On UFS soft-updates have a lower overhead than soft-updates with metadata journaling. The downside of soft-updates without journaling is that it requires a background fsck to recover leaked space after unclean shutdowns. I prefer UFS2 SU (not SU+J) on FreeBSD for small systems, because SU+J is incompatible with UFS snapshots.
journaling generally interferes with dump(8). It seems odd that they would be using dump to do backups though, since they are virtualizing the OS.
The parent link to gjournal is weird too, since gjournal is not the same as softupdates w/journaling (SU+J). It makes me wonder if they actually disabled softupdates too.
I found a random post[1] about issues (unmapped io?) running i386 freebsd with su+j in virtualbox (apparently a virtualbox bug[2]).
So I enabled Journaling and that brought it up to 30MB/sec. Still a substantial difference vs 216MB/sec for Linux.. Something with the D.O. KVM HOST setup needs to be tweaked a bit - 30MB/sec is pretty poor quality disk throughput for SSD attached storage.
