I suggest Digital Ocean should be using any mechanism that stops a single server from affecting data. A SAN backed block store allows you to provide rules for the level of redundancy required, as well as replication mechanisms for things like firmware failures, to a much greater degree than a host backed RAID array.

That's completely different from suggesting 'SANs are magical boxes incapable of losing data'. Have you considered apologising?

Servers affect data. That's kind of the whole point of servers. Maybe a multi-SAN setup with synchronous replication would have prevented the data loss. Maybe not. Not enough information has been provided to know if the cause of the data loss was the storage or the server.

But if DO had a multi-SAN setup with synchronous replication this thread wouldn't exist because DO's business model of "super cheap VPS w/ fast SSD storage" would have failed due to costs. Everybody wants Five Nines until they have to pay for it...

Digital Ocean sell 'Simple Cloud Infrastructure'. Server data might be transient, but most web developers aren't infrastructure engineers and will have no idea of this - certainly it seems to have come as a surprise to some people. Digital Ocean need to manage their customer's expectations - and upsell for people who want permanent storage - as a rude shock doesn't do well for their brand.