Why the “Digital Ocean killed my company” incident scares the hell out of me
I've had a DO mistake take down my site before, and when it was brought back up it had been reverted to several months prior. DO support was at a loss as to why this would have happened. I tried to restore from DO's backup service, but their backups had apparently stopped running several months prior as well. This was a major issue and could have easily been the death of my company, all because of a DO glitch.<p>But it wasn't, because every night I run a PG backup and copy it to AWS S3. I just had to download the backup from the other cloud vendor and restore it on my DO server.<p>Did DO fuck up? Yes. Did it cost me downtime? Yes. Was I mad? Yes, and I still am. But I still do business with DO because it costs ~half the price of a comparable EC2 instance, and writing a 10 line bash script to move my database backups to another cloud vendor isn't that hard. Storing that backup on S3 costs pennies per month.<p>I don't see "I've never run a business before" as a valid excuse, nor do I see "the cloud vendor is better equipped to handle backups" as a valid excuse. When it comes down to it, you are solely responsible to your customers. They're not going to care whose fault it was, because it was your fault.<p>Don't trust <i>any</i> of your vendors.