The number of employees shouldn't be the deciding factor when you are a tech company that apparently has fortune 500 companies as customers.
I'm not talking 5 9's redundancy. I'm talking grab a backup once a week or something, anything, to help mitigate a scenario like this. According to the thread, they lost ~1 year of data. That should be unfeasible to a company serving customers, let alone Fortune 500 customers.
Disaster recovery planning is key for a technical company to succeed. It is clear they never considered a scenario where there DO account would be closed/compromised/down.
>It is clear they never considered a scenario where there DO account would be closed/compromised/down.
I don't think the chance of DigitalOcean automatically freezing your account to a point where only a co-founder can do something about it has been well publicised.
In all practicality, DO freezing your account has the same effect of DO being down (or closing, etc.), or your account being compromised and you being locked out of it.
A contingency plan should ideally have been in place for a scenario where, regardless of root cause, you have lost access to your DO account.
Sure, but them closing combined with the chance of them freezing your account (feasible, considering the topic here) and the chance of account compromise, and the chance they go down for extended maintenance... It is inexcusable not to have a disaster recovery plan for the scenario where you cannot access your DO account.
Imagine you are a customer of this company. Would you be rallying to their defense, "backups aren't needed because the scenarios are unlikely", or would you be angry that the company had zero contingency planning and lost all of your data (or the data you rely upon)?
If you can honestly say, as a (hypothetical) customer of the company in the thread, that you wouldn't care if a company you relied upon has no disaster recovery planning, more power to you. I, however, like to make sure that the companies I'm relying on have some sort of contingency that protects me as a customer.
Plenty of one man companies have Fortune 500 customers. Most are ran like the startup in question, as basic disaster mitigation is overhead. Don't expect the world from one guy keeping a company afloat, unless you enjoy disappointment.
From my experience you don't have fortune 500 companies as a customer as a >50person,>5mil revenue company.
You may have employees from such companies paying you via their business credit card, but will never get through real procurement without documented SLA procedures which are required to prevent a scenario exactly like this.
I'm not talking 5 9's redundancy. I'm talking grab a backup once a week or something, anything, to help mitigate a scenario like this. According to the thread, they lost ~1 year of data. That should be unfeasible to a company serving customers, let alone Fortune 500 customers.
Disaster recovery planning is key for a technical company to succeed. It is clear they never considered a scenario where there DO account would be closed/compromised/down.