Despite our EX-HOSTING DigitalOcean, which after being a customer for 5 years deleted all the content of my account, including the work of this website, due to a one-month late payment.
It is reasonable that servers are taken down for non-payment, or even that they are deleted. I must say I had several emails that I didn’t see, but deleting without making a backup is insane, and as in every article, I will show with a simple calculation that they could have done better.
On AWS, our current hosting, 1GB in S3 costs USD 0.02 per month, while my server’s hard drive has 20GB, which means storing it in S3 (or some equivalent) costs approximately USD 0.4. Keeping a copy for 3 months would cost about 1.2 dollars.
Now let’s say DigitalOcean’s policy is to back up deleted server disks for 3 months, but to recover them you must pay a “ransom.” If 1 out of every 10 users fails to pay by mistake but is willing to pay the ransom, that means that if DigitalOcean charges USD 12, it would be enough to cover the expected cost.
Even if it were 1 out of 100, I think I would have been willing to pay the USD 120 to recover my 5 years of work, but instead, they gave me USD 10 in credit to set up my server again.
Now I’m on AWS, which is more expensive than DigitalOcean. If there had been a backup, I would still be there, but the truth is that their policy upset me a lot and I decided to migrate.
What is the moral? Have a local backup of your work in addition to the cloud.
Best regards!
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