First of all, I would like to state this complaint is not directed at any one person, but the steps that were taking in dealing with a DMCA request (DigitalOcean Ticket ID:###).
Having woken up to my site being down. Without any notice and on a Friday morning, where I could not do anything until I got into work, did not please me in the least.
Networking was disabled for my “droplet” and because I only use ssh key login I had to force a password reset. This gave me a long secure random password e.g. 6de9fb329ced9517. I then had to use the DO console which does not support paste functionality. If I did not enter the password fast enough the Centos console would quit and ask for the username. Even after entering it in correctly, I had to re-enter it because it asked to change the password.
Due to the DMCA not specifying the exact URL for the images instead only one page URL and the other stating “fourth image down” on a dynamic page (which means the page will change URL), it is extremely difficult to track down the exact images on my droplet.
So I requested my web server be put back to “normal” so I can do this. The response to which was:
Hello
Thanks for getting back to us.
Have you reviewed the letter that was sent in? The picture we sent
There is instructions to the images in question, and appear to include the descriptions used.
Can you help us better understand why you are unable to remove them?
No trust at all. My website is down, I didn’t have time to explain why I can’t remove them. Downtime can affect search rankings which is the main source of traffic for my website.
Thankfully, Google had cached both pages and from looking at the source code I was able to delete the images from the droplet.
Why was the network disabled on my droplet without any notice, even though there was still time to respond back to the DMCA?
I had received a DMCA a few months ago (for the first image), but completely forgot about it (I’m only human) and never heard from them again. Why could not DO send me an email or any other communication about the second one and allow me to respond (as I have stated, there was still time).
Why do I not receive a refund for the downtime caused? I make zero money from my site, but if I did, I would have lost revenue which would have been important to me.
Amarjeet Rai's Blog 