After making this tweet yesterday, Digital Ocean got in touch with me to explain what might have gone wrong. Two members responded: Zach Bouzan-Kaloustian and Tyler Crandall. Both of them sent thoughtful and thorough replies and apologized for the poor experience I'd had up to that point.
When I posted to Twitter yesterday, my goal was to learn what I had done wrong so I could properly teach students how to use Digital Ocean in the future. Turns out there was just a bug in their system related to some code that had just been deployed, and it raised abuse flags for users who signed up during a short window. They've, of course, fixed the bug and are going to make improvements to their support procedures to hopefully avoid situations like mine from yesterday.
Zach's email to me is pasted below, for the curious. But before you get to that, let me very clear: **Bugs happen. That includes behavioral bugs, like momentary lapses in support quality. Fro