It would be interesting to know if Digital Ocean would allow this thread on their discussion forum.

Linode gets knocked around for lack of transparency (which I don't find to be the case) but there are few vendors that allow open discourse about their competitors on their own company forum.

Linode - Are you going to take this? How about lowering your costs for a while to keep these upstarts from stealing your customers?

Linode - Are you going to take this? How about lowering your costs for a while to keep these upstarts from stealing your customers?

Ironically, fresh oats thru a horse - - not so good, yet fresh coffee beans thru a civet cat - - the most expensive coffee in the world.

Even though we offer free unlimited bandwidth, we still have to monitor excessive bandwidth usuage. Your account has been flagged for network traffic and we will need to evaluate your account.

Please open a ticket to avoid any future bandwidth restrictions:
https://www.digitalocean.com/support

We aplogize for any inconvenience and hope to deliver the best hosting experience possible.

Hello,

I received an email in my inbox a moment ago notifying me that my bandwidth had been throttled. I would like to remind you that your website says in multiple places that your guys have unrestricted bandwidth usage:

Most importantly from your pricing page:

Q: Do you charge for bandwidth?
A: No. There are no charges for in-bound or out-bound bandwidth.
Q: Do you limit bandwidth?
A: No we do not limit monthly bandwidth in anyway. We allow you to fully utilize the network and burst traffic without limits.

And from your features page: FREE Bandwidth - We don’t charge for bandwidth. You’ll save a ton of money with our network and it's easy to get started. No need to figure out how much bandwidth you’re going to use, whether that traffic is in or out. Set your site up and pay no extra if it takes off. All servers come with 1Gb/sec. network interface.

To me this seems like false advertising. You explicitly state as one of your selling points that you allow us to FULLY UTILIZE THE NETWORK AND BURST TRAFFIC WITHOUT LIMITS. You state that you do not limit bandwidth in any way. It seems to me that throttling is limiting by another name. One could say that a speed LIMIT on a highway is likeable to thottling the speed of your car.

I had heard that Digital Ocean is providing excellent pricing with awesome flexibility. I thought it was "too good to be true" but I hoped I would be wrong.

Thank you for your time.

PS. Your bandwidth warning email has two misspellings in it.

Your server connection has been unthrottled. We try to maintain free unlimited bandwidth for our users. However, on occasion, due to abusive users on our system, legitimate users do get flagged.

I sincerely apologize for the inconvenience.

Thanks,
Etel

ps. we will get the bandwidth email corrected

Hi Etel,

I would appreciate it if you could mark my account or at least my current droplet as white listed. I plan on utilizing a lot of bandwidth for legitimate purposes. I am abiding by your TOS/AUP. Not running a CDN or anything like that.

It would be unfortunate to have to submit a ticket weekly to get my server "unlocked".

Thank you for your time.

Hi-- I understand what you are looking to do. If you let us know let us know a little more about you and the traffic you plan to use, we can begin to whitelist your server:

Please let us know the following:

-Your Name
-Location
-Phone Number
-Type of Traffic you will be sending from the server
-1 or more of the following:
1. Your public twitter handle
2. Your blog
3. Your company or personal website
4. Your public facebook profile

Thanks,
Etel

I'm not sure why you need those details. My name and other contact information can be found from information you already have.

I plan on using the my droplet as a webserver, a backup location for my personal files, and a VPN as I travel often and would like to have a secure connection.

I also do not use twitter, have a website, blog, or a facebook.

Thank you for your time and willingness to work with me!

Upon further research I found the following:

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/ ... -bandwidth

It shows you stating (from the FAQ) what was discussed earlier. In addition someone asked about throttling:

Q: But do you throttle traffic, so that when it reaches a certain amount within a certain time period, it drops to a slower speed?
A: We do not throttle bandwidth or traffic after a certain amount. From time to time you may speed different bandwidth speeds depending on internet conditions, load on your droplet, or the system as a whole.

I believe this question was answered by your CEO, Ben Uretsky (DigitalOcean-Ben). It seems to me that the progress of this situation has gone as follows:

- You say personally say in FAQ Bandwidth is free to use without limitations.
- Someone specifically asks about bandwidth throttling
- Your CEO states SPECIFICALLY that you do not throttle bandwidth.
- I sign up for an account, pay real money for your services
- I use your unlimited services
- I get throttled for assumed abuse, which is an understandable issue
- I request to be white listed to prevent myself from being throttled in the future (which shouldn't happen in the first place according to your CEO)
- You imply that this is only possible if I give you information that was not necessary during initial sign up, including some odd requests such as my twitter account.

It seems to me you guys might be going back on your word just a bit. Please, PLEASE, assuage my suspicions.

Thank you for your time.

We are always evaluating the services, products, and offers that we give out, and adjust accordingly.

Initially we offered free bandwidth because we didn't want to spend time writing bandwidth accounting code and wanted to focus on the core product of spinning up virtual servers.

We will most likely introduce bandwidth pricing in the future however we will not go back on our word because we are very grateful to all of our early customers that gave us a shot so anyone who registers while we are offering free bandwidth banner, we will continue to honor so long as it doesn't honestly cause any issues on the hypervisor for other users and abides by our TOS, which is the same way that we treat other resource like CPU or Disk I/O.

Thanks,
Moisey

Moisey,

Thank you for your reply. I fully support your decision. I will hope that my server is white listed. If it causes an issue with performance on a host please let me know and we can take the situation from there. In the mean time until that point in time comes, I would greatly appreciate my server not being throttled.

Thank you for your time.

They lie, you lie (you state here you're running pirate bay junior, but to them you say it's a vpn gateway), where does it end?

If the "upstarts" raise their prices people will come back if they left, or more likely when something breaks and it takes ages to resolve instead of Linode's normal quick fix time then they'll come back.