Nope, the only assurance you can get is you won't be access your data, I am not sure how one can come down with conclusion of "no way they have a copy or keep it in archive/deep backup"

Having a backup and letting you to access it are two entirely different issues, and most of the time customer service staff don't know how the data management is being done by the engineering/operations team.

If you have used shared hosting you know as soon as you pay for your expired account, everything is back as it was. Never thought this was a problem until you try to test how long you can go until you pay and still restore you data.

If DO's CC can't handle data management problems they probably will connect you to their engg/ops team. So I would assume they would prefer having it resolved ( by giving the data if they had ) instead of keeping it and let user rant/post about it( which they know will probably happen ).

I agree with the first paragraph.

The second paragraph hinges on the rationale that if customer data were available, then CS (Customer Service) agents would have made every effort to contact the ops/engineering team to retrieve those to avoid a social disaster.

Unfortunately, this isn't true in the companies that I worked for, which are big customer-facing MNCs.

First of all, for US consumers, the CS teams most likely are contractors in Philippines, Malaysia, or India, they are trained with scripted responses. For any issue that is beyond the scripts, their standard response will be "Sorry we can't help you because we can't do x", one reason is they have no incentive to escalate the issue and get oneself more work to follow up, other times, it is the management explicitly decided this is to prevent too many cases hit the ops and eventually, the engineering teams. It is not that the management is stupid or nasty, just that the 20:80 rule dictates 80% of the issues usually are raised by 20% of particularly picky customers. For the 20% customers who generate 80% of the revenue, each of them will be assigned an AM (Account Manager) who can get things done much faster and more efficient than the CS team. This group of high-value customers are often given access to VPs to make sure all their issues are heard and handled properly

Second reason is most teams in a big company will not concern anything that doesn't hit them directly. For example the CS team in my ex-company upon getting repeated complaint on an erratic component that didn't get bug fix for months, eventually the CS told the upset customer to fuck off and complain to CEO directly since it was engineering department's fault.

Unbelievable? Maybe, and that company remains one of the largest high-tech companies in the world.

For the record, that's not how it works at DO. The support department encompasses Platform Support (like T1), Trust & Safety (handles cases of possible fraud or abuse complaints), and CloudOps (sysadmins who help maintain the cloud).

I'm on Platform Support and while I can't access the actual hypervisor hardware like CloudOps can, we do not have "scripts", and we always do our best to help customers in any way we can. We also have a myriad of tools that we can use to monitor our platform and help troubleshoot any issues that may arise in our tickets.

My roommate and bestie is on CloudOps, and she sits right next to me at our HQ in NYC. While we have a great remote culture, all of us on support are in the US, with the exception of one guy in London (who started last week and is AWESOME).

Not only that, but I work very closely with all of the other departments here at DO, and our executives are extremely accessible as well. If we need to pass on feedback, we always do so.

We're also encouraged to go out of scope and do whatever possible to help out our customers, and I wouldn't change a thing. I love what I do, I love the people I help, and I love my coworkers.