I'm the guy who made the Twitter post and wanted to clarify a few things because this Tweet keep coming back every year with the same comments.
1. About the thread:
First, I would like to say that this thread was purposely dramatic with the only goal to get a quick answer from Digital Ocean. We did not have a communication channel with them after their last ban email, and it was a way for us to promptly establish a communication through social pressure. And with hindsight, probably a bit of immature social-media revenge of creating a shitstorm on social media.
DO did not kill our company, they put us in an uncomfortable position. We did have two Fortune 500 clients at that time, but we had no critical data, just a few configuration variables that we were aware of and could probably recreate from our memory.
2. About the backups:
We had two database backup, DO automatic disk backup and a backup script that uploaded to DO object storage.
YES, IT WAS A MISTAKE to have all our data with a single provider. I've learned from this, and it was a valuable lesson for all the people that followed this story.
At the time, I was the only person with tech skills in a two-person company. My tasks ranged from UI/UX to NLP to DevOps, I had professional experience with frontend / backend, but it was my first role where I had to handle system administration. I think I did a fantastic job with it for a junior, outside not setting up multi-provider backups.
3. About what we did to get ban:
It really was a python script that had to process ~500k records and fuzzy match them against another DB with 1M records. It was pure business logic and nothing illegal / shady / or against DO TOS.
As stated in the postmortem, we did not have a payment history with DO, as we were still on free credit at this time. We had no malicious intent to avoid payment and had the mean to pay for what we used once the credit ran off.
4. About Digital Ocean:
I do not hold any grief against DO, it was a human a process error, it happens to everyone, big and small companies. What matters is that they fixed quickly, did a postmortem on it, and acted to prevent this situation in the future. Nobody got killed, no data got lost, and we all learned from this event.
Hope this clarifies the story a bit. And please stop harassing me about multi-cloud backups :s
Tiptap is great, I made a few custom extensions for it to build an interstitial journaling app (https://heedful.app). The documentation is still lacking to some extent, but the source code is easy to understand.