Digital Ocean - A customer review

[clivejo]

I have been keeping my eye on a new company called Digital Ocean (DO) for a while now. Their offerings seemed to be "too good to be true" so yesterday I bit the bullet and signed up. The sign up process was dead easy. They verified my email and then I entered my credit card details in the Billing section for them to take a small verification sum which they said would be refunded, fair enough I thought, as they dont charge for services until the end of the month. So far so good. I go to setup a "droplet" which is their name for a VPS, but the system wont let me, my account has been flagged and is blocked. I am really puzzled as to why I am blocked, they have all my details!! Have I entered something wrong? Has my CC been flagged for fraud? I would like to know what is wrong!

So I get a ticket opened automatically asking me to provide more details, including a link to a social media profile. So not knowing which one they wanted I replied "Which one?" Like most people I have a number of them and some I keep as "close friends and family", others I use in a more business sense. Anyway, next thing the ask me to send a copy of my passport or other government issued ID. Now let me remind you, I had not even setup a service yet and they wanted my ID !!! So my sense of humour kicked in and I replied back saying that I wasn’t applying for a US Visa or trying to get through airport security!! Whilst waiting for a reply I searched for "digital ocean account verification", and I was shocked and stunned at the stories I read!! This behaviour is very common it seems.

After all this back and forth emailing, I explained that I would like to know why I was flagged and "assumed to be guilty of something" but they wouldn’t tell me, saying that "We cannot reveal our security practices as it, obviously, would compromise our system"

Can you imagine going into business with these people and hosting a mission critical server with them, then one day out of the blue they just switch you off and block your account for no reason what-so-ever? It really could be the nail in your coffin so to speak.

So that’s my personal experience with DO and why I now wouldn’t touch them with a barge pole!!

[theLarry]

.. i figured perhaps you used the term "whilst" in your communication with them as you did in your above post. This would have immediately identified you as an educated and well spoken foreign national... the most dangerous sort ! LOL!

[clivejo]

Being in the credit card/debit card transaction business for many of years I can tell you how things look from their end:
1. Your card issuer and billing details did not match the country you are currently in.
2. They are a new company and frauders overwhelm them on daily basis

1) I guess, but why not just say "Sorry, there has been a problem with your Credit Card do you mind confirming the details" I would have no problem in doing so, but I'm 99.99% all the details where correct. All my other payments are made by the same card and no problems with them. Being based in Northern Ireland is always confusing for some businesses as it comes under part of the UK, but there is NOTHING fraudulent about it, just 100's of years of history and conflict.

2) Yes, I would reckon this type of business is full of fraudsters and spammers just looking for a platform to "work" from. But I dont think its good business sense to accuse everyone of being so. I also think I have a right to know what I’m being accused of. I hadn’t even setup a service or configured anything.


You think I'm being hard on them? LOL I was perfectly calm and collected, but I did ask if the next requirement was going to be a strip search!! My sense of humour tends to kick in. Its like the questions on a US Visa application "Are you or have you ever been a terrorist?" Like seriously, what kind of terrorists is going to tick that box!!

Maybe I'm just spoiled with my interactions with you guys and unaware on how the rest of the industry do things.

[clivejo]

.. i figured perhaps you used the term "whilst" in your communication with them as you did in your above post. This would have immediately identified you as an educated and well spoken foreign national... the most dangerous sort ! LOL!

LOL maybe, a well spoken Irish man would ring alarm bells!

[doneritehosting]

I read some of them reviews of the term "digital ocean account verification" you supplied clivejo.... They got more issues going on than account verifications... Lots more... they are not for me either.. ID verication should be done with 24hrs of opening a account if thats how they choose to do that or even not activating the account until identification is verified would be better. .. WTF does a personal FB or any other social media account have to do with verification? Can start a dummy one of those with false info real quick if I were up to no good.. The first 2 pages of google is overkill with multiple pages with reasons not to use them.

Glad you posted.... I been eyeballing them for a while...

[clivejo]

Yes it was the search that really did break the camels back, but I’m glad I found out before I actually spent any money! I do like the idea of some of the features though, but never got to try them out cause I'm a fraudster obviously!

VPS snapshots, a VLAN between servers, Backup and deploy an entire image in a new data centre in minutes. ( hint hint @ Yan ) Some nice features Id like to see

[doneritehosting]

Here you go clivejo, this is kinda amusing bout digital ocean....

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/07...loud_problems/

[clivejo]

But but but but.... I had no intention to mine for Bitcoins, Primecoins or anything of the sort!! Just wanted to see what all the fuss was about regarding these "droplets" and media hype. Didn’t expect to get my *** kicked just for signing up!

[doneritehosting]

Actually its interesting though if you could keep the mining process from going over the cpu resources for the vps.... you were talking about bitcoins at one time clivejo... is there enough money in it to at least break even a month for the cost of a vps you think?

[clivejo]

I doubt it. I would think that one VPS would be quite slow compared to some of the hardware out there. You would need something with access to physical hardware. Each Bit Coin is like a race, the faster you can process the quicker you can get the coin, hence the "mining" analogy.

The article seems to be about an offer DO had which gave you $20 of "free" credit. So I guess the problem in this case was that miners could sign up for multiple free accounts and if they then combined the processing power of enough virtual machines they would have a nice pool of free processing which could earn them money.

I notice BC miners are using GPU's more and more due to the fact that they are better and faster at the mathematics required to break the next coin. I wonder will this affect encryption too. It seems to be getting easier and cheap to buy/obtain raw processing power, this has got to be bad for the security industry who with have to keep increasing the key length in order to protect information (credit cards, banking services etc)