This week, I woke up to this nice surprise in my inbox:

Thanks, Digital Ocean!

For the purpose of messing around, but also for hosting the currently incomplete The Music Tank, I have been keeping a cheapest Digital Ocean droplet online for some time now. At 5$ a month, I have a Linux box that fully satisfied my needs.

The surprise is that starting this week, for the same price, Digital Ocean has increased my machine’s RAM from 512MB to 1G and raised my SSD disk size from 20GB to 25GB. And it turns out the RAM boost is absolutely a noticeable change.

The reason I feel this deserves a blog post is that my account was boosted for free, without any action on my part.

That is the exact opposite of what both my cell phone carrier and Internet provider are doing. I’ve been a customer of theirs for years and their offerings have changed multiple times since I’ve joined. However, for my account to get upgraded to their new ground-level plans, I would have to phone in and complain about it while throwing threats of leaving for their competitors.

I find this is a pathetic way of doing business. It effectively means they punish good payers and silent customers while giving tributes to the loudmouths.

One would think that it’s cheaper for an enterprise to automatically upgrade their customers as their service offering changes in time. I can’t picture managing hundreds of plans simultaneously, a good subset of these being invalid for new sales, being efficient. At the very least, I’m sure it can’t be simple.

I am happy to see that is not the case with my cloud hosting provider.

If you are not a Digital Ocean customer and would like to set up an account, you may use my referral link which will give you a 10$ credit. But you don’t have to, it’s not the point of the post.