Support Request
Created 7 hours ago

Droplet and all data gone for good?

Hi, apparently all your notifications of payment were marked by spam by Gmail so I have never ever (not even once) got notified my droplet and all my data inside it would be wipe out. My round-the-world trip portal with my wife at http://alfanumerico.net has nothing to take people to now! What's worse, after a friend's suggestion, I went to look for a snapshot/backup just to find nothing there... really, guys? All that was due to 20 bucks? There is no better way to inform me about such things? I am a DreamHost customer for ~13 years and that had never happened over there, and yes I forgot to pay my debts with them before, and yet my data was still there. I don't care about the droplet, fsck it, but my data? What can I do now that I paid the (OMFG) 20 dollars? Do you have some hidden backup in a stash or that's it for me?

Reply From Caio1982
7 hours ago

This is unbelievable...

Reply From Will A (Support Team)
4 hours ago

Hello,

Unfortunately, your Droplet was deleted as a result of an unpaid balance being carried for over three weeks.

We attempted to notify you at the start of the month that your account had a past-due balance, and then sent a follow-up e-mail every two days. After three weeks, we sent you a final termination notice, and your account was suspended with your Droplets being powered off. Two weeks later, your Droplet was removed from our system due to a lack of response regarding the outstanding balance.

In these cases, we are not able to recover your Droplet, however if you resolve any outstanding balance you are more than welcome to create a new Droplet and begin using our platform again.

We understand that this is not a great outcome, but we are not able to maintain Droplets indefinitely for accounts that have not paid their balances and we do attempt to give our users as much time to respond to outstanding balances as possible, without impacting the availability of resources for other customers.

Please let us know if you have any other questions.

Thank you,
Will
Platform Support Specialist
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Thanks for your feedback!

Reply From Caio1982
1 hour ago

That's an ultimate bullshit, right here, Will A. Your freaking e-mails were marked as spam by Google, without me ever marking you as spam. So this is my fault? Why don't you have alternative domains to notify billing issues? Why don't you provide secondary ways to reach users? Really, Google thinks your are spammer and I suffer for it and you can't support me now?

I just added 100 dollars to my account so it's not about 20 bucks. This is about you guys not caring at all about backups of account's data. Fuck the droplets, I can recreate them and re-setup everything anytime. But my data? How reliable are you after all?

PLEASE: If you don't have any long-term backup of my stuff please confirm this is the case and refund me the remaining credit I have with DigitalOcean immediately as I will then close my account for good. This is not how customers are supposed to be treated.

Next time I will think twice before using services that keep people's data as hostages and eventually shoot them even after getting the money from the police.

Reply From Jdonnell (Support Team)
1 hour ago

Hi there!

Thank you for getting back to us on this. My name is Jarland and I'm a Platform Support Lead here at DigitalOcean. We always strive to be helpful and provide the best customer experience that we can. I'm truly sorry that we were not able to provide that for you today. I appreciate your feedback on our systems, and will certainly carry that feedback forward. I did want to give you some insight into the situation as well, as you have been open with us.

A company of any reasonable size needs to deploy automation to handle billing matters. It is extremely common in our industry that customers cancel service by halting payments and abandoning accounts. This is okay, people want to be able to do that and we accommodate it. I would absolutely love to have a system in place that works for everyone, but just before this I answered two tickets where customers were asking me to stop emailing them about the amount due because they just wanted their account to cancel itself and be done. No matter what I do, someone is unhappy with the result. That doesn't mean that I'm not receptive to feedback though, and I meant it when I said that I would carry yours forward. At the end of the day, I can neither hold data for customers who want it gone, nor can I expend every bit of manual effort to chase down everyone who has a past due bill. I have to choose the balance that works best, and surely that balance does and always will need adjustment to be as accommodating and friendly as possible.

It is not your fault that Google marked the emails as spam, that is quite unfortunate. I'm not really in a place to tell Google how to handle it either. That is a trained filter, which means people are marking them spam, and probably will continue to do so no matter what domain we send from. However, we can work on that and do everything in our power to make sure that our emails go through to the inbox. It is in everyone's best interest that they do.

I've gone ahead and refunded your payment in full. That does leave an amount due, don't worry about that. You said that you want to close out the account so we will just leave that be. When you deactivate that will be the end of it. I hate that it came to that, I wish you would stay. I hope that you reconsider and come back later. We'll be right here if you need us, and I'll always be here to take your feedback seriously.

If you have any further questions, do feel free to ask.

Kind Regards,
Jarland
Platform Support Lead
Thanks for your feedback!

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