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.
However I do know providers like this tend to run as lean as possible, so I could also imagine they wouldn't explicitly try not to hold any data longer then strictly necessary as not only does that storage cost, it would open up having to spend time and resources providing it to law enforcement when demanded.
I don't think personal credit limits is likely to occur. Companies wants to have the lowest amount of receivables possible, especially if they are looking for valuations. I think snapshotting and archiving this data for 90 or 180 days is more reasonable for long term customers of good standing (hell it probably would be worth it for retention).
If you get the data back, you might want to look at having a way to download the snapshots at least once a week, even if you just hold 2 on your development machine. Its not ideal, but it would at least limit the loss. Finally if you are charging a customer (assumed from the "service provider" usage), I would suggest looking at seeing if you can increase you price to cover storage on another provider.
It would surprise me that DO is worse in policy than Linode, what good would it do them to delete your stuff if you owe them money? Who's going to pay a past balance for deleted content?
Are you sure you weren't WAY longer overdue than 45 days?
Are you sure your droplets aren't just turned off?
Snapshots make no sense to delete so soon, they are in cold storage essentially.
Do they not have a customer support number to contact someone higher up?
I think, due to dumbness/forgetfulness/lack of autopay on my part, I've lapsed payments for 3-4 months and my prgmr VMs stayed running.
that is, can it be made profitable in some way?
because i don't expect it to happen because companies are trying to be decent world citizens or fair or whatever.