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by sergiosgc 2567 days ago
I'm sorry to dig heels, but that's no excuse. If the credit they were given allowed them to use the resources, it follows that using the resources is not a breach of contract.

From the description I imagine Digital Ocean offers a free period or tier, to reduce friction in customer acquisition. This is a marketing tool, and must not, in any way, cause situations like the one described.

If a marketing tool induces service failure, it has no place in a professional setting.
1 comments
chewbacha 2567 days ago
Credit and promo codes are also used extensively for fraud. If a business had been in operation for a while solely on credit, it may well generate a false positive in a fraud detection algorithm if it scaled dramatically.

But it is important to disconnect monetary spending from coupons or vouchers as they are not equivalent.

You mention free tier but that’s not what was at issue here. Also, 10 additional instances isn’t in the free tier of any cloud service I’ve used.

I’m not saying that DO is correct, but I believe the parent argument was a simplification if the events in question. Also, DOs handling of it via support was far worse than the initial algorithm, imo.

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sergiosgc 2567 days ago
> But it is important to disconnect monetary spending from coupons or vouchers as they are not equivalent.

They must be. If they are not, then you've entered the territory I referred, where marketing actions are impacting service availability. This impact is not acceptable in professional services.

In this specific case, if voucher giveaways produce ingress of resource leeches (cryptominers that will never result in real customers), and if it is impossible to prevent this undesired ingress without impacting existing customers (which it is), then that marketing action must stop. This is the conclusion I expected from the post-mortem.

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chewbacha 2567 days ago
Money is fungible and fiat while vouchers are vendor-locked and not fiat, that's why they can't be evaluated the same.

I won't try to argue whether they should be removed in their entirety, that's not even an option I had even considered until now.

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