Digital Ocean blocked my account. They said my "deployment and actions were in violation of our Terms of Service" which is remarkable because all I did was create a single droplet and run a basic setup script on it. The next day — blocked, shut down, deleted. No warning, no explanation, no appeal.

Their Terms of Service allows them to delete your servers, your data, everything — at any time, for any reason, including none at all. The tiniest perceived risk to them outweighs any amount of loss to you. They won't tell you what you did wrong. They won't give you time to retrieve your data. They just delete everything and wish you well finding another provider. Here is their response when I asked for an explanation:

Hello,

Greetings from DigitalOcean!

Thanks for reaching out, my name is Raveel from DigitalOcean Support.

We reviewed the information you have shared with us so far and we have come to the conclusion that your deployment and actions were in violation of our Terms of Service Agreement [1] and Acceptable Use Policy [2] and as a result, we are unable to remove the lock from your account.

I sincerely apologize for any inconvenience caused by this.

Additionally, please note that we're unable to share details regarding what factors we considered that led to this decision or how we came to this conclusion as this is critical to maintaining the integrity of our platform security operations.

You can review our Terms of Service agreement and Acceptable Usage policy here

[1] Terms of Agreement: Legal - Terms of Service Agreement (digitalocean.com) [2] Acceptable Usage Policy: Legal - Acceptable Use Policy (digitalocean.com)

We recommend you find a new service provider that better suits your needs as our security tooling would consider these actions when you sign up again resulting in account locks and termination of linked accounts during manual platform-wide reviews.

If you still feel this is in error we request you to share detailed information about you, your business, and your deployment with us so that we can take your explanation into further consideration and contextually analyze it with information we have on file with us to review this decision.

If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to reach out.

Warm Regards,

Raveel Associate Customer Advocate DigitalOcean Support