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Digitalocean lost NY backups/images and introduced new prices for "free" backups
On Sunday March 17 at 3:07PM EST one of our backup and snapshot NAS systems suffered a hard RAID failure causing the loss of some user backups and snapshots. We tried to recover the affected files but were unable to successfully restore them from the failed device. This resulted in the loss of specific backups and snapshots
And then it follow:
Backup Pricing
Part of being a startup is sometimes admitting when you've made a mistake, correcting it, and improving the overall service having learned from those issues. When we initially launched we planned to offer pricing for bandwidth, snapshots, and backups, however we simply were more focused on developing the core functionality than introducing those pricing guidelines. This is a mistake that we ran into with Bandwidth as well and we are looking to correct it now. Our official pricing for backups will be 20% of the cost of the virtual server. So if you want to enable backups for a $5/mo virtual server, the cost for backups will be $1/mo.
And
Snapshot Pricing
Accordingly we will also be introducing pricing for snapshots to ensure that we can provide the level of service that customers expect including data redundancy and offsite backups as well. The price for snapshots will be $0.02 cents per GB of snapshot storage. These rates will also go into effect as of June 1st, also giving customers two months to adjust their snapshot usage as they like without incurring any fees in the interval.
http://www.digitaloceanstatus.com/
Starting to charge for something what was free before seems a great way to apology for lost backups 
Comments
I saw it
'how we gona charge for this?'
'hmm lets wipe everones shit and call it it a mistake' .. 'then lets announce pricing'
This is confusing, is this 2 cents or $0.02 cents?
same thing?
LOL. $.0002 is a pretty good price.
@spirit yeah, reads like an apology letter to their VC investors
Interesting, I thought DigitalOcean was supposed to be a good provider?
My opinion is that they lately lured a lot of new clients with free 5$, 10$, 20$ bonuses and now they need to make sure that those people will actually spend their credits - want it or not
Can be not same thing.
Yeah that's what I was hoping
Maybe in a month or two, they will charge bandwidth even to us that were early adaptors.
oh jeez.
another large company who can't do math
http://verizonmath.blogspot.co.uk/2006/12/verizon-doesnt-know-dollars-from-cents.html?m=1
may need xkcd mirror http://xkcd.com/verizon/
$0.02 cannot be anything more or less of 2 cents. Take aways the '$' then perhaps 0.02 of 2 cents.
Not so sure about that if you're billed per hour as Digitalocean do. That's around 0.15$ per GB/month if I am not wrong. And it's just idle vps snapshot.
Second time they change their TOS but this time clients are charged no matter what.
derp.
@jcaleb: isnt 2 cents and $0.02 the same thing?
No, in fact it was 0.02 cents :P
https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/do-you-offer-backups
**If we make a change in the future we will not modify how existing customers are billed so they will continue to have the service for free. **
Sure...
I'm just trolling
But its nice to dream $.0002 per GB of backup
I am afraid Uncle might read this...
Even with billing per hour as Digitalocean do?
And it's not standard backup space where you can add/remove/upload/download stuff but just idle image of your vps without your direct access to it unless you create new vps instance.
I meant per month, and just sitting the backup files there.
I hoped for once that there was a company who would really give all that for the price but I guess I was just dreaming...
I like that kind of backup, insurance for those moments where things go very wrong.
Compared to what other cloud providers charge for snapshots that is actually an extremely low price per GB. CloudVPS charges € 5,00 for 20GB and € 8,50 for 40GB snapshots. Zerigo/8x8 charges $0.25 per GB for snapshots
Prices is still fair and cheap though, in my opinion.
There's difference for sure, but extreme? Isn't new DO snapshot price around 3$ for 20GB/m (considering their hourly rates) but then again, aren't DO relatively new not so reputable provider yet (even if some people consider them as "big")? Would you expect to lose backups like people did with DO today also with providers you mention above?
Anyway, I think that most people here liked the most their option to set up VPS and create image of this VPS and restore with new droplet in case of need. Many won't like to see their payment suddenly expiring for non used images so they may remove just everything and set-up new VPS from scratch in case of need. I am wondering if DO will invent new way to charge and spend credits of those idle clients too. :-)
lol.
charging user because iddle and using the user database entry?
I have one DO and one image, but as they said in the email, my image is lost.
So I just destroy my vm
We have two VPS servers with Digital Ocean for DNS. They already lost one of them. When you try to race every other host to the bottom by forcing prices down, you might get there first. It's more like a Digital Joke on customers.
???
You mean, deleted? :S
???
Wow, was this active VPS/droplet? Or today NY backup loss actually?