Maybe I will start with a client of mine sending me a message on the 4th of October saying that his site was not working, it just did not show up.
I quickly went to investigate and to my surprise found that I was unable to access my dedicated scaleway instance, through the usual ssh client.
When I opened the scaleway dashboard to try to find out what was going on, I noticed an open ticket marked "Ticket 00527131 - [URGENT] Immediate Action Required : Change Boot Method to prevent data loss risk". Strange, why would I have any data loss when changing the boot method? The ticket included a link to instructions on how to change a feature of the scaleway instance which was apparently being deprecated.
Figuring that this was the cause to my server being down, I followed the instructions in the ticket but my server was still down and I could not connect to it in any way.
When I followed up with a response to the ticket that my server was still down, after following the instructions, I was referred to the same documentation link again.
I persisted and asked for a more detailed explanation of what to do, now I was being told to migrate my server to a new instance. There was also no help offered to migrate, simply a message saying this is their recommendation. Needless to say, migrating a server is no small task and takes some know how and time, lots of time.
After trying for hours to migrate my server I finally managed to do so but to no avail, I could not connect to the server in any way.
I responded to the ticket that I could not connect to the server even after migrating to a new instance. Scaleway's response was to now ask me to try and recover my data, yes recover, using yet another reference to their documentation. But why recover data if all I had to do was migrate my instance according to the original request.
By this time I have to say that I was feeling helpless and basically treated like some kind of unwanted pest. You would think that after 7 years of being a paying customer, someone would actually offer to help me out and tell me what the problem actually was, without just referring me to documentation.
After spending a couple of hair pulling days, yes apparently mounting your old instance to a new one and then figuring out how to pull out your db and files takes a little time, I managed to finally get a hold of my files and databases.
I am now in the process of moving away from scaleway to digital ocean, and it is still ongoing.
I also opened up another ticket to ask for a refund for this months bill due to all the trouble that has been caused by migrating/recovering my data. I was forced to create new instances, volumes and snapshots for the data recover process. I was met with a refusal to refund my money and a message claiming that I was pre warned of the Boot script change.
I have never experienced a company that acts so bad to a paying customer. The least that could have been done was say that they were sorry and that they would refund me the 40 euro or so that their bootscript has caused me.
My server never required the use of the boot script feature! Even after following their guide and migrating to a new server with no bootscript feature active my server was still offline.
If anyone is reading this and is a client of Scaleway, please note that this may happen to you.
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