[pcthrowaway]

So it turns out they've had these clauses in their ToS for a while now. The user who initially posted this on reddit was unable to access their account until they accepted the new ToS, which they probably didn't because they assumed this provision gave Vultr access to their data in a way they thought they hadn't already.

I'd love to know what did in that ToS though.

I think cloud providers (maybe all services really) should be required to provide some amount of notice of changes which the user will lose access to their data without accepting. Also would be really nice when providing said notice if they also included a diff from the last version the user had already accepted.

[kijin]

> The user ... was unable to access their account until they accepted the new ToS

This kind of behavior should be illegal. They're holding your property (data) hostage.

Just a few weeks ago, one of my clients had their Vultr account suddenly suspended, within minutes of receiving multiple unexpected and mutually contradictory invoices that seemed to indicate some sort of billing error on Vultr's part. The client tried to resolve the issue with customer support, but that went nowhere because from Vultr's point of view, they no longer had an account with Vultr. Catch-22.

Luckily, the client had heeded my recommendation to keep backups with a different provider in a different location. So after a brief consultation we decided, "fuck Vultr," and proceeded to restore our cluster elsewhere. Now I'm making sure that none of my other clients have any part of their infrastructure dependent on this joke of a VPS company.

[pcthrowaway]

I agree, but also, doesn't every cloud provider do this?

What if a law changes that requires them to update their ToS and would make it illegal to provide service to foreign nationals without including it? I guess they should provide a data exit path at least.

[kijin]

Yes, they're obviously free to do business (or not) with whomever they want for any reason, but there should be a way to end the relationship without the unilateral threat of confiscating your property. This is going to become a bigger problem as data becomes more and more important.