(PS: Don’t use DigitalOcean, they tend to steal your credit if they feel like it. Lost 100 bucks "promotional credit" that way with only a few days notice)
Same happened to me. I "lost" my all my credit. It was not promotional, but something I had paid. They informed me on March 31th that I wouldn't be able to use that credit after May 1st. :-(
P.S. They had no expiration policy in place when I added the credit.
For anyone curious: DO issued a ton of promo credit in the past, with an unlimited redemption period, then eventually last year said that credit would expire 12mo after redemption - effective after a month.
They backtracked on that regarding non-promo credit (referrals etc) and gave a 1-year grace period.
FWIW, I've been very happy with DO, had a couple $5 VPSes there for 3-4 years and they've been remarkably reliable. One host migration, one SLA credit and lengthy failure analysis, and a bunch of notifications ahead of time for maintenance. More than I'd expect for most hosts in the price range.
Not the most powerful for your money, of course, but awesome if you need to run some services with a public IP and consistent uptime.
Actually, they only emailed users to warn them about this ca. 10 days before it was revoked.
I had gotten $100 promotional credit from DO with the GitHub student pack, and planned to use it in my second year of university, as I knew we had to do a practical project there where I’d need it. Well, a few weeks before that project was about to start, I got the email from DO telling me they’d invalidate all my credit next week. In the end, I hosted that project with OVH, and spent over 80€ on it.
But that was extremely annoying, and while I originally wanted to also move servers of a few projects I was hosting to DO, after this I decided not to.
I said 1 month because the initial email I got was on 3/31/16, stating expiration effective 5/1, then another email retracting the expiration of my referral credits on 4/27.
A lot of people lost not only promotional credits on DO, that you get for free, but referral credits too, that you get by sending traffic, which, you know, actually worth something. So, yeah, trust is something DO doesn't deserve.
This is a question of trust. I have to trust that DO will keep my data safe, that, if the US government would be after my data, DO would prevent them from accessing it. I have to trust that DO won’t access my data.
How am I supposed to trust my, and my user’s personally identifying data, to a company that just like that revokes credit, without warning, and says "well, if you ask nicely, you can get it back"?
> ...if the US government would be after my data, DO would prevent them from accessing it.
This is completely unrealistic. If the [local jurisdiction government] is after your data, they'll have your host, ISP, and anyone else give it to them.
(Inexplicable downtime = your server being imaged.)
Believing anything else, IMO, is purely delusional.
Why? You’d trust all your private data, and your customers data, to a company that just tried to scam you out of money if you hadn’t been careful? (Maybe "scam" is a strong word, but the result is the same – changing the ToS to revoke credit with only a weeks warning certainly is shady)
https://git.io/vps
(PS: Don’t use DigitalOcean, they tend to steal your credit if they feel like it. Lost 100 bucks "promotional credit" that way with only a few days notice)