🚨 Key Gotchas Found

Aggressive Abuse Policy Enforcement Medium

DigitalOcean may suspend your droplets immediately if they receive abuse reports. False reports from competitors or malicious actors can take your infrastructure offline without warning.

"We may immediately suspend or terminate your access if we receive complaints about abuse originating from your account, pending investigation."

Data Deletion After Termination Medium

Your data is deleted 30 days after account termination. If your account is suspended for billing issues during a crisis, you have limited time to recover critical infrastructure.

"Upon termination of your account, we will delete your data within 30 days unless retention is required by law."

Billing Dispute Limitations Medium

Billing disputes must be raised within 60 days. Charges for unused or misconfigured resources (bandwidth overages, zombie droplets) become non-refundable after this window.

"You must notify us of any billing disputes within 60 days of the charge. Failure to do so constitutes acceptance of the charges."

Resource Usage Monitoring Low

DigitalOcean monitors resource usage and may throttle or suspend droplets that exceed "fair use" thresholds, even on paid plans with unlimited bandwidth claims.

"We reserve the right to monitor and limit resource usage to ensure fair use and network stability for all customers."

📊 Score Breakdown

Domain Transfer Rights N/A
Service Termination 10/20
Pricing Transparency 14/20
Data Ownership 10/15
Dispute Resolution 8/15
Exit Rights 6/10

🤔 What This Means For You

DigitalOcean offers developer-friendly cloud infrastructure with transparent pricing, but their abuse policies and data deletion timelines create real risks for production workloads.

If you use DigitalOcean, you should:

  • Maintain regular off-platform backups of all critical data and configurations
  • Monitor your billing closely to avoid surprise charges from misconfigured resources
  • Have backup hosting arrangements for critical production workloads
  • Set up billing alerts to catch overages before they become significant
  • Document your infrastructure with Terraform or similar so you can migrate quickly if needed