[bcooks]

Hi weaksauce... sorry I must have missed your earlier question.

The account had been live for some time and in that sense had history but because of credits it didn't have payment history. As some others have commented lots of startups use credits to get their business going and depending on your usage they can last you for quite a while. Payment history indicates a willingness and capability to make payments.

Part of the issue here was what triggers the algorithm used when looking at remaining credits, payment history (none), workload deltas (the new spin ups), and effective run rate (think of that as the amount of money they would be charged for the workload they were spinning up). The bug in this case was both simple and super impactful. Raisup did nothing wrong, everything right in fact. We just blew it.

Thanks for the comment on request for download of backups or snapshot. That is a great idea, I guess we just never expected to actually go shoot a real customer and the fraudsters don't ask for their data.

[weaksauce]

I appreciate the response. a followup question to that would be how they got enough credits to be running for that long without any payment?

[bcooks]

DO has a startup program called Hatch: https://www.digitalocean.com/hatch/

That is the starting place for many folks.

[freehunter]

So a startup was getting their hosting entirely for free, their paying customers were Fortune 500 companies, but they didn't have the money to pay for off-site backups.

What the hell was their cost then?