Ask HN: DigitalOcean destroyed all my data while I was sick. Any recourse?
2 by devastated | 0 comments on Hacker News.
Today after recovering from an illness thanks to the pandemic I feel like I lost everything. I fell sick during the pandemic and for 45 days was in a very bad state. I did not check my emails where there was an outstanding to pay to Digital Ocean. The amount was $3.4 over my account limit. And totally for a month it is $25 I spend. I am a long term customer with them since 2013 paying and using the service as a small time developer and service provider. I do not have enough resources to do external backups. But I do keep backups turned on and some of my projects were as snapshots requiring almost very little resources for DO. Am so devastated to find today that after I cleared my paltry balance due, I found all my droplets, backups, and snapshots wiped clean. When I wrote back to DO explaining I was sick, I am a customer since 2013 paying regularly, and this is so devastating to me, they simply said sorry nothing can be done. When I prodded more, they said they understand the pandemic situation and credited me some money into the account. They neither will escalate beyond their low level customer support nor say can restore anything. Is there a way anything can be recovered if at all from their servers? Am even ready to pay them to do so for me. Some of it is a lot of work I had put in. And the data is valuable to me. Also, I understand they will want to mitigate any non-payment risk. But think this kind of draconian policies applied to all customers is ridiculous in this age of big data and ai. Surely, they can give different credit limits for different customers (like me, a very small user for over 7 years with no issues till now) and do just a little more before automated emails and deletion. What use is giving me credits now? If they had even put in $10 into my account a month before I would have not been in this situation now.