DigitalOcean

Raised as a usability problem by 59 people on Hacker News over 12 years (2013–2024), in 45 threads.

People raised many different problems with DigitalOcean, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 50 complaints

Pages fail with normal browser protections and tell users to disable them2024-07-11
Account creation and PAYG upgrade require emailing support and repeatedly re-entering a rejected card2024-01-25
Commenter finds the VPS product awful, without saying what is hard to use2023-10-25
Locked out after losing 2FA device; support tickets for recovery are ignored2023-02-15
Subscription charges for deploy capability rather than actual deployments, which is counterintuitive2023-02-15
Can't find information about the stack in the docs2022-05-24
Dockerfile builds take very long and fail after running out of memory2022-05-17
Tech specs are hidden behind clicks and tiny text, making comparison very painful2022-05-16
Web interface is not usable for creating and configuring new apps; must use YAML and CLI2022-05-16
Thin docs; unclear how database certs reach environment variables, took a day2022-05-05
Web interface is confusing and limited, documentation not good2022-03-21
Most of the site is not usable on mobile; poor accessibility and responsiveness2022-03-15
Dashboard has become bloated and large, less compact than before2022-02-15
Couldn't find what was causing a charge on the account2021-05-05
Couldn't find what caused a $2.40 charge on a dormant account2021-05-05
Sign in button is hard to find on mobile, buried under product links2021-05-03
Saving a 13 KB file took five minutes because of rate limiting2021-05-03
Had a terrible experience registering and getting customer support2021-03-31
Setting up an app took hours, far harder than Heroku, and it was hard to get help2021-03-23
Entire huge bucket nearly impossible to download; AWS CLI capped at 1000 items2021-03-12
Truncates domain names and record contents, so similar records can't be told apart2021-02-25
Early DigitalOcean UI was intolerably terrible and less useful than Linode's2021-02-25
Whitespace-heavy design hides critical information developers need to manage servers2021-02-25
Web UI constantly hangs and errors out when used2021-02-25
Setting a new default card silently fails; changes revert on refresh, forcing manual payment2021-02-25
Domain settings are complicated compared to OVH's2021-02-08
Cancelling the standing charge is too difficult; can't do it from the web UI2020-10-06
Cannot cancel the standing charge without contacting support2020-10-06
Sign up button hides the login option, so returning users can't find it2020-09-27
Sign-in button buried at bottom of long hamburger menu on narrow screens2020-09-26
Clicking a suggestion closes the list instead of opening the topic; keyboard navigation and trouble ticket link also fail2020-08-10
Unclear how to publish a premium script on the marketplace2020-05-29
Support replies are unhelpful and a confusing error blocked droplet setup2019-05-31
SMTP traffic silently dropped on IPv6, causing undocumented timeouts that confuse users2019-05-11
Confusing made-up service names make it unclear what the products are2018-12-12
Gets emailed codes and must verify on every login because cookies are cleared2018-10-04
Fake loading bar hides that the task already finished, misleading users about progress2018-09-03
Email-only 2FA repeatedly blocked urgent access when the email was unreliable2018-07-18
Listing objects is extremely slow or times out with rate-limit errors2018-05-03
Deleting objects is very slow and the UI crashes with many objects2018-05-03
API is very slow to list objects and returns nonsensical errors2018-05-02
Support site breaks on refresh or back button, making it a terrible experience2018-05-02
Notice said to address a ticket that wasn't attached, and the fix required logging into a deactivated account2018-02-23
Mixing multiple firewalls gives unexpected traffic flows that are hard to diagnose without logging2017-06-06
VPN setup kept failing after droplet creation, needing lots of error-message searching2017-03-30
Animated signup box appearing while scrolling interrupts reading flow2016-05-10
No link back to the dashboard from settings pages, so users can't easily return2016-03-24
Timer shows 57 seconds remaining but creation from backup takes hours with no ETA2016-02-04
Account balance is hidden under Settings, hard to find2015-07-12
IP Failover is badly documented and hard to work with2015-07-08